In the same discussion, animator Gwen Frey, formerly of Irrational and presently of The Molasses Flood, suggests that a lot of animations may never have gone through an actual animator.which analyzes the audio tracks and creates animation based on the waveforms, projection, etc. At a base level, it can read as a very robotic performance and I suspect that is what we're seeing in some of the footage. You can work with the audio and the procedural tools to polish the performances in various ways of course, but when you're staring down thousands of minutes of performance to clean up, your definition of 'shippable' is a sliding bar that moves relative to team capacity and your content lock date.
In short, what these veteran animators are pointing to is a set of classic "quality vs. quantity" and "quality vs. time" dilemmas facing anyone who makes a game like this. What are players most likely to see, and what scenes will likely be observed by a fraction of your audience? To what degree do you need to rely on procedural generation versus having animators keyframe certain moments or entire scenes?In the end, it looks like BioWare made extensive use those procedural solutions, whether it's because of a crunch at the end of the development or a consistent underestimation by project managers of what their animation needs would be. The takeaway, for Cooper, is that game animation should depend less on algorithmic generation and instead devote more resources to the problem, in the form of performance capture and larger animation teams. In an era of Youtube and Twitter clips, "fast and cheap" animation solutions may have higher costs than they used to.…Many bugs look like FaceFX gone awry. I suspect that a lot of the implementation was not even done by an animator. Frequently you will have an intern or junior simply copy-paste the written script into FaceFX as a starting point. The system will automatically generate facial animation based on the letters/sounds from the text that is input. Generally this looks bad, and you need to spell out words phonetically, rather than typing them in properly – but this takes a lot of time and resources are often limited.