I think it's just dynamic loading with either small scenes of elevators (like in the snowy mountian) or just the big open world being loaded from time to time. And if you go too fast for the PS2 to load everything, the game will make Jak trip, fall on the ground and recover for some seconds.
Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 are pretty good examples of this. Most interestingly, with Half-Life 2, the morph shapes were inspired by real-world references of general muscle movements of the human face.
Minor technical nitpick: Bone driven facial animation wasn't used in this era because its very calculation heavy, and the processing power was already limited. so you could do bone driven facial anims, or have more complex scenes. Bones, however, have a very light data footprint, especially compared to morph targets, which are very data heavy. So in the PSX era you have relatively low power processors, and cd storage. So you had more diskspace than you had cpu (in relative resource terms). So morph targets made sense. Same reason early stuff like Quake and Unreal1 used morph target animation. You could do just about whatever you wanted, but charcter models took up a good bit of the disk. now the situation is reversed. We have a huge amount of processing power, but limited disk space. (in relative terms) Plus bone driven animation has the benefit of interpolating in arcs, which looks more natural. Morph animation interpolates linearly, which can be very uncanny for facial animation on a higher resolution mesh.
Ah, speed versus data, the Eternal Question. I was going to leave a comment, which probably no one would see, asking something to the effect of "...But wouldn't all those vertices have taken up a lot more storage space?" So, thanks for answering that ahead of time.
I was taught this technique as "blend shapes", and it sounds like other people in the comments had other names for it as well. Wonder why everyone has a different name for it. Regardless, a very useful technique
+CrystalFissure Glad you think so, and thank you for letting me use it! Oh and if you ever need a hand with animation related stuff, feel free to drop me a line!
Funky detail on the side: Blendshapes, morphs or whatever you want to call the technique is so cheap, it was the only technique they used in the first quake! All monster walk and attack animations where simply straight interpolations. :D
Holy crap! I didn't know you were developing Clive 'N' Wrench! I've got to say, the animation in that game is phenomenal! Has a similar feel to Jak and Daxter!
morphshapes/shapekeys/blendshapes are used in animation for film too. Though many cgi productions use muscle simulation, it's not used everywhere. James Cameron's Avatar used blendshapes for its facial work. It's my understanding that facial bones are largely only used in games
I was thinking about Dark Cloud and I believe the faces are 2D images superimposed onto a 3D model. I remember Toan being very expressive. I think for a lot of anime games and the lower res 'field' models of FFX and FFX-2 they use this, and I'd love to see a video on that process.
Ooh, so there's a different keyframe for each phoneme? I've done some linguistics studies in the past so that sounds really cool to me. Would be pretty fun but also quite exhausting to implement!
Ooooh, this morph target stuff takes advantage of how GPUs use vectorization doesn't it? Every time I see something like this I get reminded that Linear Algebra is one of the most important classes for software engineering.
Yes! I'm very interested in the technical side of game animations. I'm at the end of my education to become a game programmer and in the last project before our internships started I focused a lot on rendering and animation. I implemented something like this, but less complex. I called it "vertex animation" because I didn't know what else to call it. The way I implemented it was that I had one of the artists create a model, copy that model and modify it and then use a tool I wrote to merge those two models. Each vertex now had two sets of coordinates and when doing a draw call we sent an interpolation value to the graphics card. We used it for a single enemy that when killed would swell up and then explode. I finished the "vertex animation" technique about half-way through the project, but it wasn't implemented on the enemy until very late on the last day and I'm so fucking happy we didn't just scrap the idea. I think having an enemy that explodes on death really set it apart from the others (we only had 3 kinds of enemies) while also making gameplay more varied. And the swelling really sells the imminent explosion! Of course, there's also this impossible-to-miss orange ring around it before it happens to make absolutely sure that the player knows what is going on.
Either in America or on the Animation end of things, we call them "blendshapes" rather than "morphshapes", but either way, very good explanation of how it works.
How do i create blendshapes with more than 2 points in blender? as 2 point shape keys just LINEARLY change from 1 to the other where i need it to CURVE from one to the other so if i could add points in between i could add one half way and make a LINEAR 1 to mid diagonal then another LINEAR 2 to 3 diagonal back down. HOW DO U CURVE BLENDSHAPES WITH MORE THAN 2 POINTS???
+thepuzzlemaster64 I would love to, but there are so many different ways to achieve it, it's difficult to confidently write a script! However, if I do manage to get a concrete answer, it's definitely something I'd like to cover!
hi CGJ i was wondering if you know of any really good animation/rigging tutorials for stuff like jaks model in jak & daxter. his body morphs when he jumps and inflates when he punches.
+thomas frank Rigging is very program specific in my experience, so it would really depend on your preferred software. Morphing is kind of an extension to animation, but a great place to start would be the books "The Animator Survival Kit" and Preston Blair's "Cartoon Animation". They goes really in depth into animation arcs, weight, balance and exaggeration.
Do you know if they used this technique in the other games in the series? The facial animation in Jak 2 and 3 is noticeably more natural and slightly less cartoony than the original, though this could be related to the increase in character model detail. Great series!
+Erik Larsen As far as I can tell, yes. I believe they still used the same method, albeit with slightly less exaggerated poses; and as you say with more detailed and more realistically proportioned characters.
+dogen I agree that I certainly prefer the first for it's pure platforming, and fun colourful environments. But after replaying the whole Trilogy recently, I must say I enjoyed Jak II and Jak 3 much more than I did the first time round.
The geometry and textures for a level are allocated to RAM (I'm not entirely sure what goes to VRAM and what goes to system memory) and whatever is on screen as determined by the camera is drawn (rendered).
hello, I can understand for memory reasons why vertices could not be added to the model between key frames but I don't understand why they couldn't be taken away. (I really new to game dev stuff so I'm probably missing something obvious.)
+ClassicGameJunkie ah ok, thanks for making all these videos, there is this idea that everything in game dev is this arcane impossibly complicated thing to accomplish and these videos are really helpful to get past this. I'll watch em as long as you make em :)
***** Glad you like them! I'm by no means an expert though, however I think game dev is like anything; if you look at the big picture it's a daunting behemoth, but when you boil it down to it's component parts it's all very logical.
If one was to pick a craft in game development, which one would you say is most useful overall/always needed? Because I like graphics but I get the impression that a lot of people wants to do that while other areas are less popular and in higher demand (plus I've seen the steep competition in graphic art).
+Mandatorial I'm by no means an expert, but as far as I can tell there are way more people with skills in every facet of game development than are needed! I think what's important is finding something you are really passionate about and focusing your efforts on trying to become better than your peers.
+Mandatorial I recommend that you download Unity and Blender and start doing tutorials, and as you proceed just pay attention to the areas where you have the most fun and pursue those. It's important to pursue the disciplines that you find most fun, because in order to get professional with them you're going to need to spend lots of time and hard work getting better at them, and the fun and excitement that they cause you to feel will fuel that hard work. But, if you want a heads up on a niche profession within game development, I recommend the role of "technical artist". You don't need to be able to produce the prettiest artwork, and you don't need to be as deeply proficient with computer programming as you would if you were just an artist or a programmer. Plus this is a development role that fewer people pursue. But it all depends on if you find it to be fun. Technical artists focus on scripting tools for other artists, and working on more complex art elements like particle effects and interactive objects.
+TheFireburn02 I recently added the show to UA-cam's new "shows" section, and it seems they automatically add the show's title as a prefix. I've fixed it now, appreciate the heads up!
how did they make game characters disappear? in ocarina of time when enemies die fire surrounds them but you don't notice the enemy model is shrunk to nothingness. I'm curious if other games had better ways of executing this.
+Nicholas Kaighen Simple things like shrinking an enemy can be done by animating the XYZ scale of the mesh; more complex games may animate the scale by creating a lower polygon bounding box called a "free form transform", which allows you to scale the vertices of the mesh by manipulating parts of the bounding box. This is used when you see squash and stretch effects on an object. And they can control a mesh's invisibility by animating the transparency value of either the mesh itself or the texture that is applied to the mesh. In Ocarina, you often see them use a combination of effects, including the fire that you mentioned; some enemies will fall apart (at that time, it was common to build characters out of multiple separate meshes bound together, because it was faster to render the animations); and sometimes enemies like Gohma will "disintegrate" by animating an alpha channel that controls the transparency of individuals pixels in the texture. Their effects were actually quite sophisticated for the time.
+Fuzzy Studios That's a pretty open ended topic. There's a huge amount of different things that go into game design, so it's quite difficult to discuss something so big! MGS is a series I would like to cover in the future though.
+HASEnoncorperated I would imagine somewhat, if memory serves they do seem to grow and fold out of nowhere. At a guess I'd say they were spawned into ratchets hand when the player equips them but shrunken down. Then it would be a case of morph it into it's folded out bigger version. However there are a multitude of other ways they could do it!
You know this is one of the biggest missing features in latest R&C games that I noticed so much as a child in the older games. I absolutely loved how the weapons basically unfolded from the handle into their full form.
+Steven I think that's their name in Blender, but as far as I know this is the more common name. Either way, I would imagine the process is mostly the same.
+ClassicGameJunkie They can also go by 'blend shapes' when using a 3D package like Maya. Morph targets tends to be what they're called in 3DS Max (a different 3D package). They're all pretty much the same thing, just different terminology based on the software. I don't think any 3D package I know actually handles them any differently than what you showed in the video though, the system is a pretty common and ironed out one. You can use them together with bones if you want however.
+JetCaesar Some of us really enjoyed Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 thank you very much. They weren't perfect, but they were far from "bad". Even the terribly wooden voice acting actually added to the amusement. Not to say I wouldn't have preferred if it had been good voice work and they could have been better. But even the Even the horrific Sonic the Hedgehog reboot actually had some nice levels in there, it was just spoilt by the engine being the most shoddy pile of crap ever created, and those loads times, holy...
+Alex Atkin Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 were fucking disgraces to the dreamcast, and all other platforms they were released on. And I don't even want to talk about Sonic 06'...
+Alex Atkin Dude. Look. I'm (obviously) a huge Sonic fan, and the Adventure games hold a special place in my heart. But objectively they're bad. REALLY bad. Incredibly linear level design. Unfair traps. Awful camera. The list goes on. I still think Sonic gets too much hate because most (but certainly not all) of his recent games have been great, but the Adventure games are easily the most overrated games of all time. Heck, I'd honestly argue Sonic 06 has *less* flaws than the adventure games.
+PK the Hedgehog Objectively bad? I disagree, and you fail to give a convincing argument for that assessment. You say linear level design as if that's a bad thing. It's not. Half-Life 2 has an incredibly linear level design, for example. Still a great game. And while Mario 64 was surprisingly open for a platformer, Nintendo has since been making Mario games more and more linear again. Unfair traps? Only if you have the reflexes and memory of a baby. Awful camera? I don't think so. The camera is fine when you play like you're supposed to (e.g. don't attempt to backtrack). The camera in Super Mario Sunshine was far more troublesome. Still a good game, though.
How did they do the animation in Uncharted? Oh yeah, that's right. All they did was hook up guys in suits and just let the actors act it out. So creative and technical...
As Sharif said, if the goal of the game is to look realistic then yes; This would be the way to go. And there's nothing wrong with that at all. However if they hooked guys up in suits in completly wacky-animation style and just left it like that? Then yeah, i'd raise an eyebrow or two at that too.
That's why the guy in the video said that morph shapes is better suited with cartoony characters because the viewer isn't expecting them to move realisticly in the first place.
Here from Extra Play, and I'm glad I came. You've just acquired a new subscriber. ;)
Same :D
Me too!
Please do one about the no loading screens in Jak and Daxter! That's the more interesting tech from this game I think.
+Jon Scott Smith nah m8 blend shapes are where it's at
I second this, it really is a great feat they achieved.
I think it's just dynamic loading with either small scenes of elevators (like in the snowy mountian) or just the big open world being loaded from time to time.
And if you go too fast for the PS2 to load everything, the game will make Jak trip, fall on the ground and recover for some seconds.
Thanks Dan for bringing me here =w=
Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 are pretty good examples of this. Most interestingly, with Half-Life 2, the morph shapes were inspired by real-world references of general muscle movements of the human face.
Minor technical nitpick: Bone driven facial animation wasn't used in this era because its very calculation heavy, and the processing power was already limited. so you could do bone driven facial anims, or have more complex scenes.
Bones, however, have a very light data footprint, especially compared to morph targets, which are very data heavy.
So in the PSX era you have relatively low power processors, and cd storage. So you had more diskspace than you had cpu (in relative resource terms). So morph targets made sense.
Same reason early stuff like Quake and Unreal1 used morph target animation. You could do just about whatever you wanted, but charcter models took up a good bit of the disk.
now the situation is reversed. We have a huge amount of processing power, but limited disk space. (in relative terms) Plus bone driven animation has the benefit of interpolating in arcs, which looks more natural. Morph animation interpolates linearly, which can be very uncanny for facial animation on a higher resolution mesh.
Ah, speed versus data, the Eternal Question.
I was going to leave a comment, which probably no one would see, asking something to the effect of "...But wouldn't all those vertices have taken up a lot more storage space?"
So, thanks for answering that ahead of time.
This episode combined with the coverage on Extra Frames really gives me a greater appreciation for Jak and Daxter's design hurdles. Bravo good sir.
How Did They Do That? Ocarina of Time Lens of Truth
This is quickly becoming one of my favourite UA-cam series. Keep up the great work :)
I was taught this technique as "blend shapes", and it sounds like other people in the comments had other names for it as well. Wonder why everyone has a different name for it. Regardless, a very useful technique
Extra Play brought me and I am so happy. As a game art student this is the channel I've been wishing for.
Sonic Adventure also did this. Or rather, tried to do this.
It did rather look like Sonic's moth and eyebrows were trying to escape his head!
Great stuff! I'm actually doing a brief intro course for Animation and I knew you'd talk about key framing!
Thanks for using my let's play as footage!
+CrystalFissure Glad you think so, and thank you for letting me use it!
Oh and if you ever need a hand with animation related stuff, feel free to drop me a line!
Thanks dude! Extraplay brought me here and I'm definitely going to watch more!
Best episode yet! Very well done!
You are the pro on Game Faces!
Funky detail on the side: Blendshapes, morphs or whatever you want to call the technique is so cheap, it was the only technique they used in the first quake! All monster walk and attack animations where simply straight interpolations. :D
Holy crap! I didn't know you were developing Clive 'N' Wrench! I've got to say, the animation in that game is phenomenal! Has a similar feel to Jak and Daxter!
morphshapes/shapekeys/blendshapes are used in animation for film too. Though many cgi productions use muscle simulation, it's not used everywhere. James Cameron's Avatar used blendshapes for its facial work.
It's my understanding that facial bones are largely only used in games
+Elise Spalding I've heard both, I think it depends on the CG studio. Either way, both work fine.
This is transforming on one of my favorite channel! :3 Great Stuff (And Games :3 )
I was thinking about Dark Cloud and I believe the faces are 2D images superimposed onto a 3D model. I remember Toan being very expressive. I think for a lot of anime games and the lower res 'field' models of FFX and FFX-2 they use this, and I'd love to see a video on that process.
BEST.CHANNEL.EVER!
What I was interested in learning about which was not covered is how they implemented the morph information into the game engine.
I have never tought about the face
Ooh, so there's a different keyframe for each phoneme? I've done some linguistics studies in the past so that sounds really cool to me. Would be pretty fun but also quite exhausting to implement!
Called "Shape keys" in Blender 3D
can you link me a tutorial, please?
Ooooh, this morph target stuff takes advantage of how GPUs use vectorization doesn't it?
Every time I see something like this I get reminded that Linear Algebra is one of the most important classes for software engineering.
Yes! I'm very interested in the technical side of game animations. I'm at the end of my education to become a game programmer and in the last project before our internships started I focused a lot on rendering and animation.
I implemented something like this, but less complex. I called it "vertex animation" because I didn't know what else to call it. The way I implemented it was that I had one of the artists create a model, copy that model and modify it and then use a tool I wrote to merge those two models. Each vertex now had two sets of coordinates and when doing a draw call we sent an interpolation value to the graphics card.
We used it for a single enemy that when killed would swell up and then explode. I finished the "vertex animation" technique about half-way through the project, but it wasn't implemented on the enemy until very late on the last day and I'm so fucking happy we didn't just scrap the idea. I think having an enemy that explodes on death really set it apart from the others (we only had 3 kinds of enemies) while also making gameplay more varied. And the swelling really sells the imminent explosion! Of course, there's also this impossible-to-miss orange ring around it before it happens to make absolutely sure that the player knows what is going on.
Either in America or on the Animation end of things, we call them "blendshapes" rather than "morphshapes", but either way, very good explanation of how it works.
Can you explain how the road turns in games like Pole Position and Rad Racer? That's something I've wanted to know for a while.
I feel the Tekken 1 cutscenes deserve special mention here. ;)
I've always wondered about the twisty corridors in the Forest Temple in Ocarina of time. How did they do that? :)
One thing that i think people would find interesting to know is how they were able to make f-zero so fast, yet non-laggy, on the snes : )
I wonder how they did windwakers facial animations... maybe similar to this. they were cool.
Great video!
Extra credits sent me!
How did they make the 2D-3D flip in Super Paper Mario?
How do i create blendshapes with more than 2 points in blender? as 2 point shape keys just LINEARLY change from 1 to the other where i need it to CURVE from one to the other so if i could add points in between i could add one half way and make a LINEAR 1 to mid diagonal then another LINEAR 2 to 3 diagonal back down. HOW DO U CURVE BLENDSHAPES WITH MORE THAN 2 POINTS???
Can you talk about how sphere walking works in Sonic Adventure 2, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and in Super Mario Galaxy?
+thepuzzlemaster64 I would love to, but there are so many different ways to achieve it, it's difficult to confidently write a script! However, if I do manage to get a concrete answer, it's definitely something I'd like to cover!
how do sonic's eyes and mouth work
Aren't bones more complicate than morph shapes, execution wise?
So it's more or less just per-vertex interpolation between keyframes? Seems simple enough.
hi CGJ i was wondering if you know of any really good animation/rigging tutorials for stuff like jaks model in jak & daxter. his body morphs when he jumps and inflates when he punches.
+thomas frank Rigging is very program specific in my experience, so it would really depend on your preferred software. Morphing is kind of an extension to animation, but a great place to start would be the books "The Animator Survival Kit" and Preston Blair's "Cartoon Animation". They goes really in depth into animation arcs, weight, balance and exaggeration.
Extra credit sent me here !
Does this method applies to car damage in racing game?
At 2:13 there are quads, is that bad for character models ?
I wanna know how the models in Mario Kart 64 work since they just look like a bunch of images.
At first I thought it was mrpalidan speaking.
Do you know if they used this technique in the other games in the series? The facial animation in Jak 2 and 3 is noticeably more natural and slightly less cartoony than the original, though this could be related to the increase in character model detail. Great series!
+Erik Larsen I feel dirty that I still haven't gotten around to playing these.
+Erik Larsen As far as I can tell, yes. I believe they still used the same method, albeit with slightly less exaggerated poses; and as you say with more detailed and more realistically proportioned characters.
+Alex Atkin You should!
+Alex Atkin You're not missing that much imo, the original is the best.
+dogen I agree that I certainly prefer the first for it's pure platforming, and fun colourful environments. But after replaying the whole Trilogy recently, I must say I enjoyed Jak II and Jak 3 much more than I did the first time round.
I really want to know how a game can remember the parts of the level that is not being drawn (generated) at the moment.
The geometry and textures for a level are allocated to RAM (I'm not entirely sure what goes to VRAM and what goes to system memory) and whatever is on screen as determined by the camera is drawn (rendered).
How does a minimap and fog of war work?
hello, I can understand for memory reasons why vertices could not be added to the model between key frames but I don't understand why they couldn't be taken away. (I really new to game dev stuff so I'm probably missing something obvious.)
+JamesFLivingstone It's actually due to the nature of vertices. Each one has a unique ID, so by adding or taking away one you screw up the ID list!
+ClassicGameJunkie ah ok, thanks for making all these videos, there is this idea that everything in game dev is this arcane impossibly complicated thing to accomplish and these videos are really helpful to get past this. I'll watch em as long as you make em :)
***** Glad you like them! I'm by no means an expert though, however I think game dev is like anything; if you look at the big picture it's a daunting behemoth, but when you boil it down to it's component parts it's all very logical.
If one was to pick a craft in game development, which one would you say is most useful overall/always needed? Because I like graphics but I get the impression that a lot of people wants to do that while other areas are less popular and in higher demand (plus I've seen the steep competition in graphic art).
+Mandatorial I'm by no means an expert, but as far as I can tell there are way more people with skills in every facet of game development than are needed! I think what's important is finding something you are really passionate about and focusing your efforts on trying to become better than your peers.
+Mandatorial
I recommend that you download Unity and Blender and start doing tutorials, and as you proceed just pay attention to the areas where you have the most fun and pursue those. It's important to pursue the disciplines that you find most fun, because in order to get professional with them you're going to need to spend lots of time and hard work getting better at them, and the fun and excitement that they cause you to feel will fuel that hard work.
But, if you want a heads up on a niche profession within game development, I recommend the role of "technical artist". You don't need to be able to produce the prettiest artwork, and you don't need to be as deeply proficient with computer programming as you would if you were just an artist or a programmer. Plus this is a development role that fewer people pursue. But it all depends on if you find it to be fun. Technical artists focus on scripting tools for other artists, and working on more complex art elements like particle effects and interactive objects.
+Beef Chavez
Interesting. Thank you for the great advice! I'll look into it :)
Why is the name "How Did They Do That!?" listed twice? It's like that on all the other videos, too.
+TheFireburn02 I recently added the show to UA-cam's new "shows" section, and it seems they automatically add the show's title as a prefix. I've fixed it now, appreciate the heads up!
But what program they use???
+Martin Barrett Maya I believe.
ok thanks
2:30
Not sure what that is but it ain't Maya. Maybe 3DSMax?
I don't get people that turn the layout white. It should be black xD
Did you miss the part where ClassicGameJunkie said that that model is from his game? 1:50
gazcan1
wat? You do realize that games are not the thing you use to model and animate right?
how did they make game characters disappear? in ocarina of time when enemies die fire surrounds them but you don't notice the enemy model is shrunk to nothingness. I'm curious if other games had better ways of executing this.
+Nicholas Kaighen
Simple things like shrinking an enemy can be done by animating the XYZ scale of the mesh; more complex games may animate the scale by creating a lower polygon bounding box called a "free form transform", which allows you to scale the vertices of the mesh by manipulating parts of the bounding box. This is used when you see squash and stretch effects on an object.
And they can control a mesh's invisibility by animating the transparency value of either the mesh itself or the texture that is applied to the mesh.
In Ocarina, you often see them use a combination of effects, including the fire that you mentioned; some enemies will fall apart (at that time, it was common to build characters out of multiple separate meshes bound together, because it was faster to render the animations); and sometimes enemies like Gohma will "disintegrate" by animating an alpha channel that controls the transparency of individuals pixels in the texture. Their effects were actually quite sophisticated for the time.
Oh, that makes allot of sence. Good point
Extra Credit brought me here
keep it up!
how did they get incredible graphics out of the ps2, especially in games like MGS3?
+Fuzzy Studios That's a pretty open ended topic. There's a huge amount of different things that go into game design, so it's quite difficult to discuss something so big! MGS is a series I would like to cover in the future though.
How Did They Do That? Mode 7 Graphics
How do you find this stuff out? I'm doing a games programming course and these videos are proving to be very useful!
+Oliver Benson A combination of research, digging through the games files and experience. Glad to be of some help!
ClassicGameJunkie Ah cool thanks! Could you take at how Super Paper Mario converts from 2D to 3D? :)
Oliver Benson Well as far as I know, it's sprites rendered on a 3D plane. However I may well look into whether there's more too it.
so is this how they do the fold out guns in ratchet and clank or is that something else?
+HASEnoncorperated I would imagine somewhat, if memory serves they do seem to grow and fold out of nowhere. At a guess I'd say they were spawned into ratchets hand when the player equips them but shrunken down. Then it would be a case of morph it into it's folded out bigger version.
However there are a multitude of other ways they could do it!
You know this is one of the biggest missing features in latest R&C games that I noticed so much as a child in the older games. I absolutely loved how the weapons basically unfolded from the handle into their full form.
1:56 is that gmax?
It's actually 3DS Max, but Gmax is a watered down version of that, so you're not far off!
@@ClassicGameJunkie Thanks!
aren't these called shapekeys?
+Steven I think that's their name in Blender, but as far as I know this is the more common name. Either way, I would imagine the process is mostly the same.
+ClassicGameJunkie They can also go by 'blend shapes' when using a 3D package like Maya. Morph targets tends to be what they're called in 3DS Max (a different 3D package). They're all pretty much the same thing, just different terminology based on the software. I don't think any 3D package I know actually handles them any differently than what you showed in the video though, the system is a pretty common and ironed out one. You can use them together with bones if you want however.
+PyroKnight Ah, well good to know, appreciate the info. And indeed, the method I use does usually mixes both morph's and bones.
How did they make Sonic Adventure so bad? (Dreamcast)
+JetCaesar Some of us really enjoyed Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 thank you very much.
They weren't perfect, but they were far from "bad". Even the terribly wooden voice acting actually added to the amusement.
Not to say I wouldn't have preferred if it had been good voice work and they could have been better. But even the
Even the horrific Sonic the Hedgehog reboot actually had some nice levels in there, it was just spoilt by the engine being the most shoddy pile of crap ever created, and those loads times, holy...
+Alex Atkin Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 were fucking disgraces to the dreamcast, and all other platforms they were released on. And I don't even want to talk about Sonic 06'...
+Alex Atkin Dude. Look. I'm (obviously) a huge Sonic fan, and the Adventure games hold a special place in my heart. But objectively they're bad. REALLY bad. Incredibly linear level design. Unfair traps. Awful camera. The list goes on. I still think Sonic gets too much hate because most (but certainly not all) of his recent games have been great, but the Adventure games are easily the most overrated games of all time. Heck, I'd honestly argue Sonic 06 has *less* flaws than the adventure games.
+pROvAK - Wrong, Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 were fun games, among the Dreamcast's best.
+PK the Hedgehog Objectively bad? I disagree, and you fail to give a convincing argument for that assessment. You say linear level design as if that's a bad thing. It's not. Half-Life 2 has an incredibly linear level design, for example. Still a great game. And while Mario 64 was surprisingly open for a platformer, Nintendo has since been making Mario games more and more linear again.
Unfair traps? Only if you have the reflexes and memory of a baby. Awful camera? I don't think so. The camera is fine when you play like you're supposed to (e.g. don't attempt to backtrack). The camera in Super Mario Sunshine was far more troublesome. Still a good game, though.
How did they do the animation in Uncharted?
Oh yeah, that's right. All they did was hook up guys in suits and just let the actors act it out. So creative and technical...
The whole point of Uncharted's animation was for it to look realistic, though. What's more realistic than the motions and nuances of real people?
As Sharif said, if the goal of the game is to look realistic then yes; This would be the way to go. And there's nothing wrong with that at all.
However if they hooked guys up in suits in completly wacky-animation style and just left it like that? Then yeah, i'd raise an eyebrow or two at that too.
That's why the guy in the video said that morph shapes is better suited with cartoony characters because the viewer isn't expecting them to move realisticly in the first place.
Best episode yet! Very well done!