Life Design

Before I became an animator I was an indecisive, floundering community college nerd. Most of my classes had to do with art or the understanding of life. I took many painting, design, anthropology, philosophy, writing, and cinema courses. Of all the classes I took the one that taught me the most, and the one I was clearly most interested in, was life drawing.

Life drawing showed me how people are really built underneath the skin. It taught me the human form, motion, anatomy, weight, balance, posture, gesture, silhouette, shadow and even timing: Everything an animator needs to know. It taught me that walking is really just falling forward.

Seeing the body in unique poses and having to get them quickly down on paper leads your brain to an intense, speedy study of function determining form and the inherent necessities that foster both. Life drawing is a study of not only motion and shape but of design as well.

This doesn't happen overnight. I was a quick study and a standout with some natural drawing ability but to really understand the human form it took years. Hell, I'm still learning. The forms that make up a creature's body tell the history of its' functional necessities and beneficial adaptations. This isn't a new idea but one that I feel most animators don't fully understand the weight of. That's true of many character and concept artists as well. It's often said that in order to break rules you have to first understand them and this is the case with writing, animation, design and many other disciplines. This all starts with learning the rules.

In my career I've had to animate some of the most ridiculous designs I've ever seen. I've resisted, struggled, fought against, overcome and conquered many of them. At the end of the day, yes, you can make good animation with poor character design. You can even make something completely unbelievable look good. However, as someone who is close to last in the pipeline of a typical game character, animators should fight against having to sacrifice their work and fight early on. It's o.k. to disagree with a character design if it doesn't make sense. It's o.k. to question whether or not this character is even able to walk, eat, sleep, or let alone shit. This is a character you have to make move and live and breathe. The harder someone else makes it to do that, the harder your job becomes. Then again, it's only o.k. to disagree if you know what you're talking about.

I've been spoiled. I have worked with some of the best designers in gaming today and learned more in a few years than I ever would have on my own. Combining their knowledge of game language and my own interest in animal biology and natural design, I've succumbed to a place where the, "no player will care," attitude isn't good enough. If I care, someone somewhere else might, and that is what isn't good enough.

I've worked with many artists who were truly 3D born. That is to say that they had no 2D background. They had no understanding of the fundamentals of drawing, draftsmanship, or even structural understanding. They think they learned art because they've learned a 3D package. They may know how to sculpt but don't understand anatomy. They may know how to make a mesh but don't know the musculature underneath. They might even think they can animate because they made a ball bounce "properly." This is more common than you'd think. Possibly because, "no player will care."

Once there is an established paradigm only then can you step away from it. You can expand, reshape, reform and mold new ideas. You can branch out into new ways to use existing locomotion to suit game play purposes. This is the way of the world and it's how creatures change, but without fundamentals as a base you're left with something that is entirely fantasy. Entirely unreal. Entirely alien; Perhaps even alienating.

This is an especially sore point for me because I truly believe the idea that people recognize things firstly through silhouette, secondly through color or detail, and as a tertiary measure, motion. Kids make up monsters on a chair because a lump of clothes can look eerily like a humanoid shape. When a character design doesn't fire on all three cylinders properly (silhouette, color, and motion) it fails. There is, of course, the argument that what is uncertain can add to the effect of uncertainty, unfamiliarity, and eventually fear but that seems like rather lazy design. It's simply alienation through the foreign, which is slightly unrealistic(you too, zombies). Despite American jingoistic tendencies or even in our imaginations, in the real world, the most fearsome things are not foreign. They're in our backyards(See: 28 Days Later; If you think zombies are the most terrifying thing in that film you are horribly mistaken).

I've gotten way off track but while I would like to think that most animators are typically 2d artists in their own right this is surprisingly not the case. Many 3D animators can't draw at all, or at the very least never bothered to succeed at it. Many have never taken a life drawing course, either. I highly recommend it to anyone learning or working in animation, but also to concept artists. Their work extends to every department that comes after it. The more knowledge that trickles down from the basic understanding of animal development, coloration and motion the more it is represented in each subsequent department. I'd even suggest this to designers as well. You drive the purpose behind the motion that encourages a player to play your games. Understanding the basics of movement might not only help us animators, but might also help in your designs.