No Blocking.

Since I've received some comments about my five frame rule I realize that I should have clarified that that is not the end-all-be-all animation solution, it's just how I typically work. That's not to say every animation ends up with keys spread apart every 5 frames. Sometimes I do have to make timing adjustments but the point is that doing so is much easier to do when your file and your columns are clean. If the timing works out then that's great; If it doesn't all I do is slide neat little columns around.

The other day one of our animators was referencing a file from God of War III I did for the Hermes chase. During that particular level Hermes taunts Kratos, egging him on, teasing him, and generally being a pain in the ass. Throughout the sequence this other animator and I were tasked with doing all of Hermes' animations. We protested that it could be done with about twenty animations scripted through AI but we instead went the more tedious (and time consuming) route of making unique animations across the entire level. This meant unique transitions for unique geometry, unique taunts, and unique idle animations; It was a TON of work and we had to hustle to get hundreds of animations done in a very short period of time. Luckily he and I both came from the first pass/final pass school of thought, have a similar workflow, and knocked them all out pretty quickly. They weren't our greatest animations but they worked.

The animation my friend happened to be looking at was a rather long stretch where Hermes climbs up a bridge that has fallen. He jumps and climbs and flips acrobatically throughout the whole thing. While looking at this particular animation the animator remarked, "How did you do this? I would have had twice as many keys."


(Swear I'll eventually get a video of my own for this.)

This got me to thinking about how I actually go about planning animations and I realized that most animators do a lot of blocking where I do none. In fact, I often refuse to do blocking because it's quicker for me to just "Go." I work this way because my animations are all key poses anyway(Keep in mind that I work on in-game player animations so this might not apply to a cinematic, but generally speaking I work from start to finish without turning back).

I've found that like the Animator's Animator/Designer's Animator dichotomy, there is another one in the form of Physical Actors and Mental Actors. Occasionally I will see one of our animators get up and act out a move. They will grab a fake sword or weapon and physically imitate what they are going to animate. I do this as well when I'm stumped but if there is any planning at all, it's usually done in my head. The majority of the time I allow motivation and personality to let gravity take the character where it needs to.

In the case of Hermes climbing the bridge there wasn't much forethought at all. The only thing I had to worry about was that Kratos couldn't catch up to him. This meant over a certain amount of frames Hermes had to travel upwards to a distance of x. The movements he makes all came from a necessity to travel that distance with an acrobatic flair and I let his momentum take him, varying what he was doing enough to make it interesting. In fact, if the player completes the sequence perfectly Kratos ends up right on Hermes' heels and just slightly out of reach.

Since we were working rather blindly from level design and cameras(and they from us), a good many of the "Hermes Run" animations weren't seen. This was so frustrating because the cameras could have showcased both Hermes and Kratos but that ended up not being the case. The bridge sequence was one of the few that was clearly visible. It's also an example of a five frame rule animation that had timing changes. Because Hermes was so damn fast most of his anims received a timing change. Often this was done by scaling all of the keys back but the bridge in particular needed several footfalls and hand grabs on 2s or 3s. In the end the file still came out mostly on 5s but it's obvious that most of the points of contact with the environment couldn't have been done that way.

The Hermes run was really fun to animate because there were so many different motions we got to play with, though virtually all of them, hundreds of animations, went unseen. At the time all we had to work with was rough level geometry (which sometimes changed), temporary cameras, and a predetermined destination for each transition animation. The only way we could have gotten all of those animations done was to simply, "Go."