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Character Grounding with Foot-plant
I hate "foot sliding". I have hated it since 3D games hit the shelves on the
PS1 when I was an animation student. It eliminates the weight of the
characters in the game. A system pioneered for FIFA 2007 was fully
integrated into Madden NFL 09 this year by our "Rookie of the Year" engineer.
She implemented the system and gave it some very nice improvements to help
compensate for the number of players we have in close proximity on the field.
We now have the system well tuned and functional and it really helps the
characters have more weight than we have seen in the past. Check out this
comparison video from 08 to 09:
In this video I wanted to show you the feet up close, first in real-time and
then in slow motion. If you watch in slow motion you can see that the feet
are released just before the legs are stretched too far, but when I under-steer
that spin move (which is animated to end in the same direction it starts) and
turn it into a 180, you can see that the feet stay nice and planted.
Note: I am sorry for the 08 stuff not being as clear as the 09, all the 08
footage I could dig up was captured by Ian Cummings on his PC a while ago, and
is not progressive scan footage like the 09 is. It does show the animation
just as well, but it's not intended to be a rendering comparison.
Click here for the foot plant video
Locomotion
Our basic player movement got the guts ripped out and replaced this year.
We re-animated all of our run cycles from motion capture and we also implemented
a brand new procedural animation system for driving it. We added
procedural leaning for momentum changes, and the results are much more visually
pleasing than what we have seen in the past. Most importantly, we don't
sacrifice control of our players. Along with this we had the ability to
dampen the AI decisions and get rid of a lot of the "jitter" that is caused by
needing to make thousands of complex decision making calculations 60 times a
second. With the new locomotion system we are able to improve what occurs
when all these factors make the AI "change its mind" very quickly. Check out
this comparison video from 08 to 09:
Click here for the locomotion video
Transition Control
We gave our artists control over every transition. This is something we
have been doing on FIFA for some time, and it's time consuming and sometimes
painful for the animation team, but well worth the effort. All of our
animators spent many hours this year in a tool that allows them to see and
"scrub" the transitions very much like working in the 3D software we animate in.
Based on the visual feedback we can iterate on where animations should break
out, and when they do exit, we can set how that transition should look.
This system allows us to dive pretty deep into the controls, so you can imagine
with about 10,000 of these in our game, we had our work cut out for us.
The result is an over-all smoothing of what you see without losing an ounce of
controller response.
We never "delay" the transitions, in fact, in pretty much all cases
animations will end faster than before, or be interrupted by another state (a
feature that was added for Madden NFL 08 and improved farther this year).
However when this happens we can now see it, and use the tools to make it look
the way want, basically animating control over the blend of current and previous
animations to create new motion. This gets rid of the momentum changes and ugly
pops that occur when characters transition from one full body animation to
another. The result is a much smoother game overall. This is
quite important now that we run at 60fps on both the 360 and PS3 because
transition pops would be more obvious.
Read the rest of the blog here:
http://www.easports.com/madden09/fullsite/news.jsp?itemID=anim_blog2 |
