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Wasteland 2 - Animation Blog

Lead Animator for Wasteland 2, Josh Jertberg, has kicked up an blog entry at the official site:

Quote:

Animation in Wasteland 2 was an unknown for me, never having worked with the Unity engine before. I did know one thing in my mind though when we started: I wanted to hand-key the animations. It’s an ambitious goal of mine and one I hope fans appreciate in the end. It’s my feeling that I can bring more personality and flexibility to the animation, as opposed to using motion capture. Plus, let’s face it; as an Animator I will be more artistically invested in my hand-keyed animations. Even with the best motion capture actors you are many times stuck using what you have recorded. The unique aspects and camera of this game do present some good opportunity and challenge for me as an Animator.
One of the struggles as an animator in games is the animation system. A good system can make or break the look of the animations. The animation is broken into so many different pieces that if you don’t have some decent way of controlling that, the entire flow of the animation can feel off. Animation systems have evolved a LOT in the past few years. Wasteland 2 is not a controller driven game and many of these systems are designed for analogue input. I needed a simpler solution and I think I’ve found one.

More information.

yadda yadda yadda, where's the sample?

I don't really understand some developers, they can talk all day long, but when it comes to the point where you should show a screenshot or something, they're hiding it like a snake legs.

What this is saying is they are using third party tools to do core development. What that means to me is it may be harder (or more expensive) for modders to extend the game. The good part is that Sage is only $75 for basic edition so its reasonably priced for the few animators out there that would want it. And I'm not clear if it would be required in the end or not for modding the game. I'm hoping they will be willing to release an official skeleton for max, maya or blender and blend graph structure for modders to use or something.

If you want to see a demo of Sage/Unity you can go to http://www.alteredr.com/sage/ for your screenshot fix. The demo is likely not worth your time as I found Unity Web player only works in IE and was finicky. The solder demo end product they have isn't very impressive compared to mocap but I'll grant that what they showed was bare bones and was still pretty good for what was shown. Having said all that, for this game I'm not sure we need anything fancier that this. Looking forward to the end product.