Hercules.

Here's something I did on God of War III:



Everything in this clip was animated by me except for Kratos' swimming at the end. The Hercules fight was a somewhat frustrating but really fun time during development. I always enjoy animating Kratos and this final beat down on Hercules was one of my favorite things I worked on. It took at least 7 different departments for the whole thing to come together but I think it turned out pretty well all things considered.

I talked about the first pass/final pass mentality but one thing most people don't realize is that the big difference between film animation and game animation is the amount of time spent on a particular sequence. Games require multiple animations that connect together through code, while film is typically multiple shots pieced together with editing. This means that while an animator for a film might be given 2 months for one shot, an animator for games might be given 2 days; Sometimes just 2 hours for a single animation. As a result many game animations aren't as polished as they could be but if the moment is sold well enough and the animation is passable, it's good enough to be in the game. More often than not the animations during the Hercules fight had to be done as fast as I could get them done.

There are still a couple things that really bug me about this sequence, chief among them is the repeated punch Kratos throws while Hercules is pinned down. What ended up in the game was truly a first pass animation that took maybe a half hour to finish. It's only 4 key poses spread across just twenty frames. You can see that as he continues to punch the animation speeds up, which I would have liked to fix with multiple, separate, faster and better animations. Instead, to get temporary animations in the game for design to mess around with, I scaled the original punch's frames to make a slow and fast version and in the end that's what stuck. When the camera dept set up the varying angles on Kratos and Hercules it actually worked better than I thought it would.

There were a few design elements that also needed animated cameras to change. One of these was Kratos sliding down the arena as Hercules lifts it upwards. The camera had to show the arena being tilted and the peril waiting at the end. Kratos tumbles and slides and rolls all the way down the surface until crashing through the arena's rail at the end(which is probably my favorite part). Originally the camera followed closely behind Kratos(a la Uncharted 2's crumbling building)as he slid down the arena and hung suspended above him as he flies off the end. Since there was no art below the arena I couldn't point the camera downwards, and instead had to pan out, cutting at the last second as he breaks through the railing. As a result the camera is way too far out to see what was probably the most polished animation I did for the entire fight. I'm not sure how jarring the cut is to others, or how obvious the height of the fall is(all the way down Mt. Olympus), but for what we had to show I think it worked out.

In the first iteration of design there was a completely different way for Kratos to climb back to the top of the slope but that was scrapped when we realized it would require new code. At the time we were rushed and no one had any real alternatives but I figured we could rely on our normal cs moves so I went ahead and made the gigantic bicycle-kicking jump attack back up to the top. It went in the game but was way too fast for a button prompt so I suggested slowing down the jump towards the apex of its' arc. As soon as the slowdown went in I tweaked the camera and animation to show Kratos' silhouette as strongly as possible, with depth of field for added effect. All of that sold the idea. Seeing that jump in commercials for the game confirmed(at least to me) that it was a solid GOW moment.

Originally the outcome of the fight was much less certain. The little homage to Disney's Tarzan was the original ending, which stayed in the game, but it's definitely less effective/uncertain after having seen Herc's face crushed in, which we added later. The face smash was actually inspired by the movie Irreversible, in which a guy's face is brutally crushed by a fire extinguisher. Again, Hercules' reactions to the repeated punch are another animation that was temporary at one point yet stayed first pass. His lack of movement actually added to his helplessness, making it an even more grisly scene.

One other thing that I think worked really well were Hercules' bare handed cs moves(not shown), which allowed us to get really close with the camera and also show off Kratos doing some cestus punches that look pretty powerful. They also show him rolling back into his fighting stance, looking ready for action.

In any event the Hercules fight was riddled with logistical problems and design issues. What started with one designer and one animator for the first half ended up being passed along to another designer and yet another animator to finish it. Everything got ironed out eventually and I think overall it's a decent (if somewhat tedious) fight. The work we did at the end really helped the sequence feel heroic(if a bit leaning towards gore porn) and probably made the fight more memorable than would have been otherwise.