Getting to Know the Electronic Arts Animation Toolkit
Author of this post: Beth A. Dillon | About Blog Authors »
I was over at the Vancouver International Game Summit in lovely Vancouver, British Columbia (it was finally sunny for the first time this week for the whole of Vidfest and the Summit) checking out the Animation panel. Several perspectives were offered on creating successful believable characters, so I’ve broken them down into bite-sized pieces.
First up, Atomas Goldberg, Electronic Arts’ Director of Animation Technologies, gave a run down of the EA Animation Toolkit (ANT). Goldberg feels that the real challenge to create lifelike believable characters that are both visually engaging and highly responsive to player input is more about philosophical approaches than the tools themselves.
Goldberg’s guiding principles include trying out several solutions to animation problems, giving artists absolute control over the visual quality of the motion in the game, and innovating with a whole game team.
“Animation is not a solved problem,” he pointed out. There are complex problems such as motion blending, procedural animation, and physical simulation, but even more general problems like locomotion have different constraints depending on the game. For example, player and non-player character motion is very different in a game like NHL than Medal of Honor. For all of these, it’s really up to the team to come up with solutions that work best for the game being made.
In any situation, though, artists need control! Goldberg believes there’s not much point in hiring professional animators if little of it appears in-game—often the content just ends up staying in Maya. Animators should be tasked with tying in layers, blends, transitions, and procedural effects like leans and head tracking for the live gameplay.
Of course, innovation is strongest when the game team communicates and shares resources. EA ANT is run as an internal open source project—20 fulltime engineers support a community of over 100 active contributors, which include both animators and engineers across the company. Because of such rapid communication, over 200 Plug-ins for the ANT have been developed by and shared between different game teams. These include everything from multi-character interaction, fully-body IK, foot-plant, animation retargeting, physics-informed controllers, locomotion control, motion warping, time-warping, phase-matching, procedural awareness, head tracking, and the list goes on and on. In fact, as Goldberg pointed out, 75% of the Plug-ins used in the creation of NHL 08 were developed by other game teams.
As an added bonus for the tool, all behaviors are exposed for animators to access them—team members can set emotional response attributes between characters and objects or other elements such as dialogue. So essentially, animators can easily apply emotional behaviors to the characters for in-game interactions.
All of this development in procedural animation is particularly helpful with sports games, which continue to rapidly develop in realism and test the balance of the uncanny valley.
