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Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation

GDC Festival of Gaming

555K subscribers • 54 videos on Hallway • Conference channel

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  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by David Rosen, founder of Wolfire Games
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 9 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

786K views9 years ago4 recommendations

Game developmentGraphics and audioGame programmingBuilding a game engine

David Rosen explains how to use simple procedural techniques and physics constraints to achieve fluid character animations with minimal keyframes.

In this 2014 GDC session, indie developer David Rosen explains how to use simple procedural techniques to achieve interactive and fluid animations using very few key frames, with examples from indie games like Overgrowth, Receiver and Black Shades. GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives. Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/Official_GDC Check out our Facebook page for GDC exclusives facebook.com/GameDevelopersConference Visit our site: ubm.io/2ctNvqZ

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Widely recommended as an excellent and practical guide to implementing procedural animation in games.

dognotdogon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Matrix Is Unreal”

> link to this video David Rosen pulled off quite a few little masterpieces -- his gamedev competition entries always had fantastically unique aspects. I cannot believe "Black Shades" was almost 20 years ago! (I have no affiliation, but I am glad to see link is still alive and kicking!) Lugaru and later Overgrowth have been the outcomes of what can only be called a decades long obsession with getting the player controls just right, allowing very natural and responsive control and movement, through creating emergent behaviors from first principles, resulting in a rich and natural interaction with the environment (and other characters, see the fighting mojo), in contrast to the many, many AAA titles th…
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neandrakeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Overgrowth: Open-Source Announcement”

Here's a video I've enjoyed of David Rosen giving a presentation at Game Developers Conference 2014 going over procedural animation used in Overgrowth. link to this video
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KronisLVon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Overgrowth: Open-Source Announcement”

Not only that, but some of their approaches were immensely cool, they used procedural animations from just a few keyframes, have a look at this video that someone else linked a while back "Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation": link to this video
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turtledragonflyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “PIDs: Creating Stable Control in Games”

Not the person you asked, but here's a video you might like: link to this video In that example, they do the character's physics first (just a ball), then match the animation to it. The animation speed is controlled by a "surveyor wheel" approach — go to to 336s in the video for that part. So, the animation speed is derived from the physics, rather than the physics speed being derived from the animation. I wouldn't call that "IK" exactly, which would be more for things like matching the foot to individual stair steps as the character walks up them, or such. But I suppose in a broader sense it is, since you're deciding on a physical goal a-priori, then forcing the animation to match that goal.
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omgketchupon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Matrix Is Unreal”

link to this video It's definitely possible to "not bash into walls" You don't always need to have bespoke animations- sometimes keyframes and realistic constraints can get you there. I think Unity is working on a framework for natural human animation.
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arran-nzon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Overgrowth Game Engine Open Sourced”

Happy to see this! Looking forward to dive into the procedural animation system David talked about at GDC. 0 0: link to this video
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darzuon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Northlight makes Alan Wake 2 shine”

I’ve always preferred the Wolfire approach0: animation should “do no harm” to player control, it’s only there to add flavor, never at the cost of game responsivity 0 link to this video
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dymkon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Northlight makes Alan Wake 2 shine”

The keywords you're looking for are "procedural animation" and "inverse kinematics" - Overgrowth was doing this in 2009. The developer did a presentation at GDC 2014 on it: link to this video
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rootlocuson Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters”

While I agree it's incredibly jarring in some games, I'm always thinking back at a presentation by David Rosen on procedural animation: "First, do no harm to the gameplay". He's talking about animations in particular, but I feel that should be a core pillar for any game designer. Many things are unnatural in games: you don't instantly recover from a beating by eating one apple in real life, but we're ok with it in games because it makes the gameplay fun. link to this video
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