To answer a couple of the common questions and responses: 1. "Couldn't a bunch of these animations just be mirrored?" Yep! Quite a few of these turns and pivots are likely completely symmetrical. But the game engine is (probably) not mirroring anything at run time. The left and right versions of each animations are usually separate animation assets, with the mirroring being done manually by the animators ahead of time. 2. "Technically speaking, not all of these are 'animations'. Some of them are more likely system-driven or code-driven motion." Also true! While many of these turns and transitions and such COULD be achieved with additional animation assets, many of them are more likely set up some other more efficient way under the hood. I've mostly treated them as additional "animations" here for the sake of simplicity, to avoid getting too deep into the technical weeds trying to explain systems that may or may not be involved. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to make that "rough estimate" caveat up front and then spent a few minutes emphasizing the impact of technical systems toward the end. Really, animation-counting like this in hopes of getting an EXACT tally is a fool's errand: individual animation assets are only half the picture and we can only speculate about what else is happening under the hood. This video is more about providing a glimpse at that hidden complexity than about fussing over the number itself.
"... This video is more about providing a glimpse at that hidden complexity than about fussing over the number itself." A critical point that is still so often forgotten by consumers of most products. The details behind how something ends up from an initial idea through to a delivered product takes a lot more work then is generally given credit. Increased consumer awareness can then help drive discussions and priorities around what players care about and elevate quality to meet their expectations. Great topic and coverage and I'd be interested to see more specific game examples broken down in this fashion 👏
From what ive seen, im pretty sure a lot of links animations are code driven. I remember seeing a video talking about the tech behind links climbing animations and how they automatically map his hands to the surface of the object hes climbing so im guessing a lot of his other animations are similar.
hey,big fan btw can you make a video about the spark the eletric jester games on steam? they are a lot like sonic games but have diffrant animations for stuff like combat or the stratigic gameplay.
@@TheEmeraldSword04 Mario's various stopping and about-face animations are extremely important to gameplay. They are platformers, and those things are timing & move state markers.
Mario's code in Super Mario 64 has 208 animations total, including cutscene animations. The lean (and head turn) is driven directly by code, which makes sense for that era of game. Categorizing them is a bit of a challenge, but I'd list: tiptoe start, tiptoe, walking, running. There are also two different animations for walking/running while holding a light object, and the slow walk while you have a heavy object in your hands, and they're replacements, not additives. The Super Mario 64 engine didn't support additive animations. And that's not including all of the animations for things like pushing up against a wall / sidling it, or the many ways you can sliding down hills! Even in older games, there's far more animations than you think :)
pretty sure mario has Idle,Move start,sneak*3, walk *3, run*3, maybe more than 1 run animation, fact is that old games dont have blends or so they need to make sure that EVERYTHING is animated.
@@JasperRLZ I'm not sure what driven directly by code means. Do models still have rigs or is it something totally different? Makes me realize I really don't know that much about animation in games of that era. I suppose they might use some techniques that are totally archaic today.
I've worked on many games over the years, so my guess was a lot higher, closer to 60 :). But then you decided to ignore stuff like crouching and strafing. And if you want a bit of a datamined spoiler, checking Breath of the Wild, Link has 20 animation files for walking, and 32 animation files for running, not including strafing, crouching, or the step-over stuff you mention, and not including any runtime animation systems. I'll let you theorize on which ones you missed (and let me know if you're curious to know the answer). Thanks, as always, for putting all of our hard work in context. Games always take far more work and labor than most people can imagine.
@@NewFramePlus ❤Really glad to hear you enjoy it, you've been a huge inspiration what I make. And thanks for covering the Sonic games so I don't have to.
I don't know if this counts, but Link also has a sliding animation for going down really steep hills. It would probably have some other animations attached to it as well.
When Link looks up and down at hills and cliffs, that’s actually a new animation that didn’t return from BotW. It really cool to think that super small things like that can still be added to a game like BotW. Tears of the Kingdom is such a GOOD GAME.
this game is ridiculously good. like, one of my favorite things to do is just watch how link moves around in the world. sometimes i'll just walk around for a while and appreciate all the little details they managed to cram into this short king. my favorite animation has to be when he ascends and he shakes his head a bit. then, depending on the terrain, he'll either hop out or just climb out. this is my new favorite game.
@@ryanadolfi4007 Another little detail I noticed was that Link holds 1 and 2 handed weapons differently depending on if they are fused or not. Unfused 1 handed weapons are pointed down towards the ground, while fused weapons are horizontal to the ground. 2 handed weapons are twisted so the material points upward in his hands compared to unfused. I can’t tell any differences for spears.
TotK is probably a better game than BotW on average, but at the same time has worse flaws in places. The way you use the champions' powers is often cited, but my pet peeve is the ring menu for powers of the tablet. It's slow, inaccurate and it's even worse if you use joycons :( I think the game also makes you switch from one power to another more often, due to how important some of them are. Ring menus worked much better in TP and SS. The animation is definitely solid though.
The craziest thing about all these animations is that they all have specific sounds based on your clothing, if you walk or run with a shield, sword and bow together, based on what weapons you're carrying around, based on the floor and according to the structure, since there is a difference between open and closed places. The sound design of this game is insane. If you're using a set that allows you to walk more silently, the sounds will change, as well if you're using a monster mask, since the way Link approaches enemies is slightly different. Crazy.
Someone once pointed out that link's voice gets louder and softer based on how close he is to the camera. if he's closer to the camera he's a lot louder. idk if that's impressive or not, but I thought it was interesting that they made the sound come from his character instead of just letting it be something the player always hears (since he's always right THERE anyway)
The idea that nothing is "for free" in game development is a very important thing people overlook. You have to code in things specifically and can't take it for granted. If you want a stop animation for walking, you gotta put that in. If you want a game to return to the main menu if you back out, you have to put that in. So many little details we don't even think about when playing a game have to be deliberately put in and tweaked. I have a lot of respect for anyone in the industry, and it's great to see a channel like this continually highlighting the hard work that goes into deceptively simple things.
I try to explain this every time someone asks for a feature to be added to a game, and says to anyone who disagrees "It's just an option, you don't have to use it." No matter how simple you think that option is, it takes time to develop, test, fix, and support that option; time that could be spent on any number of other things instead.
@@Nibbieful I think the same thing about movies. I remember when endgame came out, a lot of people were like "they should've included a scene where X happens!" and every time I wanted to go "THREE HOURS, guys. This movie is three hours long. If they added anything else in it's gonna add up!" If someone has zero experience with the process that goes into making something, it can be really hard to conceptualize just how much work has to go into it. The ironic thing is, the more well made something is, the less people will realize how incredible it is; since it will follow exactly what they expect to happen in their heads.
It's especially moreso when you need the game to be optimized to heck and back. But with enough engine power, many things, while not strictly "for free" can be done in-engine or be premade assets outright, which significantly reduces the development time as well. Of course, you then tend to get a lot of games that looks/feels identical because of that, and we literally have a term for such: Asset flips.
CGI too. People will act like CGI is some lazy soulless practice when its arguably much more labour intensive and difficult than practical effects. Practical effects gets so much detail and quality for free that CGI needs to have done manually.
This just makes me realize how complex human movement is and how much work has to go into selling that this is a person, that when characters have weight to them it's because of all these elements coming together. Some of these changes are so small and imperceptible, but without them I'm sure we'd say that a character felt more "weightless" or "stiff" or "floaty" in their animations.
I guessed 40 animations and came a lot closer than I thought I would! I’ve never worked with 3D animation before but I understand enough to know the effort that goes into it. Great video!
I did too, but then thought "you're thinking that because the video clearly goes for a lot. So depending on how walking is defined here, the base shouldn't really be more than 20." And while I am in the camp that some stuff might not need to be counted indiviually (like the L/R variations), even with those together it's way over 20 :D
Link also has a bunch of different movement animation sets for some of his different armor. For example, when he wears the Yiga armor he moves more like a Yiga, without directly copying the Yiga footsoldier movements. Similarly, in BotW he had very different set of animations when he was dressed as a Gerudo vai.
Link's tracking of the upcoming obstacle blew my mind. It's so subtle, but I have to imagine took hours to program. It's something that most people will probably subconsiously notice, but never once actually register as a fully formed thought unless you're *really* looking for it like you are. Just another example of that Nintendo quality. Also I guessed 20 thinking I went way over, and ended up barely guessing above half of the actual answer.
"Hours to program" is underselling how much effort even small things take. You have to build an entire system around making a target for Link's head and pivoting it to face the target. Then you have to validate that against all kinds of scenarios. Take every single animation for Link in this game and multiply it by the number of things Link can look at, and that's the number of things you have to validate in a test sandbox. Then you need to do that again every time there's a systemic change that might impact it, and across the time of development there are inevitably many changes like that. Features like this can be a years-long process to fully implement.
@@FearlessSonto program, probably an hour or two, maybe even less tbh. to add data for all the items he could look towards, set thresholds depending on the current animation, that's the part that sounds like it'd take a ton of time
@@Temulgeh My point is that this kind of thing is a process. You can't drill it down to an hour or two. It intersects with so many other systems that you'll be adjusting and programming it across the length of the project. (I'm speaking as someone who writes test automation for a living.)
@@LTNetjak Yeah, that's what I'm taking about. In games in particular even "simple" things often end up being the most complicated to fully implement, whether those be doors or turning a head to look at something (see also that infamous slow-mo clip from an American football game that has a player's head spinning 360 degrees trying to follow the ball.)
I'd say it's a lot less effort than you think, but it's a very elegant solution: Think of it as functioning similar to the camera, it's basically an invisible object with it's own ai that by default goes in front of the player character. Said object is affected by terrain, so it'll adjust to such, and also has an object detection where it would move towards any object of interest. And... that's pretty much all there is to it. In the same way the camera object is a very simple, but elegant solution to how to handle player vision in 3ird person games, and in fact I wouldn't be surprized if this invisible object uses very similar coding to camera objects. Of course the animation of the head turning is it's own thing, but head turning animation is a solved problem, you aren't doing anything new with this, which just provides a direction for the head to look at. (well, head turning animation SHOULD be since it's literally following camera animation logic, but some games still gets it wrong so I dunno)
I remember looking through the game files for GRIS and there's *a lot* of transitions there, each of them represented by at least 12 separate frames. There's even a difference between transition "cube form to swimming" and "falling to swimming"
Certain things like the head tilt when turning and the torso leaning are likely not separate animations, but simple bone modifiers; similar to how Link moves his head to look at NPCs or objects of interest. Really neat breakdown video!
Hey, if you haven't heard of it, you should check out the hand-painted game, The Masters Pupil. It's an adventure puzzle platformer coming out this month on the 28th and, as I said earlier, the game's assets were hand-painted onto actual paper. I am in no way affiliated with the devs, but I've been seeing their social media and I think it'd be really interesting to look at! I'm curious about the challenges that come with the method and if, in your opinion, it was worth it!
12:50 Yeah he definitely has that permanent marker in front of him. If you press X twice while running, he will also only take out the paraglider if the hill his running on is sloped far enough down that he will be able to have it out for a minimum amount of time. The only way Nintendo could do this is with a marker like that.
Ehh, no, not necessarily the “only” way. I always assumed being able to run, jump, and glide off a slope was a result of *just* enough distance being made between you and the ground as you’re jumping forward that the game lets you take out the paraglider. To be fair, if they have an empty that’s already tracking elevation ahead of Link, I wouldn’t put it past the devs to also use it to check if there’s enough of a drop ahead that it’d be reasonable to take out the paraglider. Personally, I think my theory is the more likely of the two since the latter would be likely to introduce bugs and generally be way too finicky to implement effectively; also, why? I can’t think of a scenario in the game where your idea would be the ideal solution when the game already naturally takes care of situations like “Link running down a hill, jumping and trying to paraglide” by having a minimum distance from the ground from which he can paraglide.* *OR: even more simply, only letting Link paraglide if he’s in (or entering, in the case of a slope) one of his many non-ragdoll falling animations. This I could see being the most likely implementation since you can paraglide just before hitting the ground from a fall, but cannot paraglide when jumping on flat ground.
i feel like this video could've just kept going forever, and id be sitting here mesmerized at all the different lil tiny details and animations that make Link's movement feel as good as it does. Very epic and cool.
Love this!! I considered doing a video on Link's animations in TotK but ultimately decided I don't have the games experience to do more than appreciate and point at what I *am* able to notice, so I'm stoked you decided to approach the topic! I guessed 25, but I wasn't even thinking about crouching, strafing, etc! And that look-target antic touch is incredible. Thanks for sharing!!
Hey Dan did you notice they actually removed an animation from botw? When link walked on logs in botw he lifted his arms and looked down trying to balance himself but he doesn't do that anymore in totk, my guess would be because since you can make vehicles with logs now the animation would make no sense in a log boat for instance, but in my mind that would also be easy to account for? (If log is not attached to other objects do animation) I'd love to hear your thoughts on that...
Slightly more complicated than that: You could stack logs lenght-wise and suddenly the animation would make sense again. And perhaps it'd make sense for other objects too, but only in certain configurations. I'm sure there was a good reason why they left it out, and complexity-to-account-for vs value added to experience likely was it
@Kram1032 i honestly never noticed it in botw! then again, i never cut down trees to make a bridge in that game. i'd usually just jump whatever gap there was and climb the rest of the way up. still a neat detail 🙂
I think the most likely reason would be that the balance animation conflicted with the new one-handed animation(s) for the Zonai powers but since I am not an animator my guess is less educated than any of Dan's.
I just love how smooth and satisfying the editing is. Whether it’d be the physical notification of whatever we’re counting as an animation, the smooth transitional process of changing the clip or scene, or just the in general THE INTRO SEQUENCE. Is it just me or am I obsessed with the way the words move??? (Yes, it’s just me.) The background music and sound effects add onto the video feel and feed into overall theming is fun and natural. Like every time the notification goes “bloop” and it slides down. I don’t know, it feels good.
Gotta say, I love your editing style, and the completeness and depth of your research. I grow in appreciation for game development and animation after I watch your videos. Keep it up!
when he walks over like a log or something similar that requires balance, he puts his arms out and looks down more, and the position of his arms change depending on how fast you go. It looks absolutely adorable to see him balance like that for some reason, it's my favourite animation.
Heh, love the use of the "try to grab a weapon" animation at the end to pull out the final count! My very rough guess was about 15 - I had figured out walk/run (didn't realize there was a fast walk), out of stamina (but not sprint, weirdly), the 180 degree turn, and "I definitely haven't remembered everything so let's tack on one more", and then multiplied it by 3 to include uphill/downhill. The bit about the dynamic sightlines on slopes and stuff was fascinating!
Say what you will about Nintendo, but they always press to nail the basics of locomotion and controllability in their games. Seeing how in-depth Link's basic running and walking goes in TotK reminds me of those stories where the devs spent months just focusing on Mario's movement, making sure it felt right before building anything else. It's really cool to see!
11:34 "Inverse Kinematics" I've gotta remember that one: when characters' feet shift position to match the terrain they're on, that's my favorite animation detail that tells me, "oh, these game devs were CAREFUL"
I love that in the middle you point out how all of this had to be made. So many people take so many aspects of games and animated works for granted cause they just watch it happen and work. But it's not like actors, or things that exist in the real world normally, in fake spaces like this every single individual aspect has to be created, made by someone, or multiple people and then correctly implemented. Obviously engines help make this possible, creating consistent rules and systems, like links hair isn't actually animated, it just does what the physics of the engine say it should do. But for the most part, there's an absolute ton of work that goes into even the small details of these works and I really appreciate you just taking a small extra moment to remind people of that within the video. Even tho your entire channel makes it obvious.
One of the animations I love is the quick turnaround-- when Link's running forward then immediately has to run backwards. There's a great sound associated with that too!
My guess as an absolute minimum for the different states of movement was 4 animations: One for idling, walking, jogging and sprinting, with the caveat that you could add animations for various other scenarios like turning, as well as stuff like Inverse Kinematics and physics animation, to make the movement feel smoother and more complete. I failed to take into account crouching, strafing and blending animations. This is a good breakdown, thank you for making it!
12:48 : That's an amazing touch! Was that system in Breath of the Wild? I have a mild phobia of heights and specifically ledges, and while there are plenty of those in BotW, I felt hyper-aware of them in TotK and it was weirdly stressful. If Link is 'aware' of the ledge and reacting to it, maybe that's what I was picking up on. (Also weird, that sensation entirely went away as soon as I got the Paraglider.)
This is such a fascinating watch in the context of working in Dreams where all of these animations can be covered by all the slider settings for the procedurally animated base character.
There’s a lot of little animations that I didn’t even notice, and I’ve been playing as this Link for 6 years! Great work to all the animators on the Zelda team! The only artist I could find online is Satoru Takizawa, but I’m sure there were more people who worked on animation.
This video was an absolute treat! As I'm not really knowledgeable about animation generally it's always fun to gain a new appreciation for the animations that blend in the background and I sometimes take for granted.
I love how this also doesn't get into all of the custom animations that result from Link using his various hand abilities wilst moving. You can move in all the aforementioned directions while using Ascend, which in and of itself is also technically locomotion, just upwards. Similarly, moving with ultrahand, fuse, and autobuild all have subtly different animations or unique things Link can do *all while walking*.
One other neat non-locomotion animation I found was with recall. Fuse and ascend have their own singular (or 4 for fuse) animation and the Ultrahand just turns you into the direction you are aiming. But you can't do that with recall because it neatly stops time. So when you recall an object in the bottom left corner of the screen Link will actually move his hand to his left hip to reach the object. That's probably some inverse kinematic game logic stuff but I like it. Also I have noticed for clothing that there seem to be parts that are affected by physics and points where the clothes are pinned to Link's body. Especially noticeable with the thunder attack body piece. ALSO I have noticed the many different weapon holsters you have for your melee weapons! Most fabricated weapons (no sticks) have one which goes away when fused and turns into a generic belt loop, the only deviant being the master sword which never looses its sheath due to magic blade-ness. Weapons with sheaths include all the standart weapons like knight, soldier or royal, the boomerang and the amiibo weapons, probably more. Zonaite weapons are weirdly excempt. Spears just have a little loop but I think that also changes. It's just so neat having this little barely noticeable detail.
A lot of the counted animations here could just be hard coded model rotations or IK or controlling the speed/position of the animation. The animation bootcamp GDC talk does a great job showing how a lot can be done manually without explicit animations. I'd say leaning, slowing down, and a lot of the standing pivots can probably be done without unique animations. Might be wrong ofc, more careful observation could disprove this. Good stuff!
I guessed 30, which I’m pretty happy with considering my complete lack of animation experience. This was fascinating! Too easy to take this kind of work for granted, I’m glad the relatively clueless like myself have someone like you to show just how much effort and talent goes into making animation so functional and stylish.
Ocarina of Time actually did the inverse kinematics for feet being on different elevations way back in 1998. Same with Links head looking at objects, afaik. The Spyro remakes also had Spyro looking down if there was a cliff or drop.
Now stand and walk around slowly with a Kilton mask for Bokoblin, Moblin, Horriblin, Lizalfo, and Lynel disguises. Each has some extra cute roleplaying animations and sounds.
I guessed exactly half the total. Which is wild given they favored snappiness, it feels like some animations are left out to make Link more responsive.
Thanks man you gave me some items to add onto my template as I am making my TOTK animations videos.. there’s also the low gravity areas where Links jump animation is different…he has an idle animation looking at his right hand… it’s crazy these little things developers add that take so long to perfect ,but often get overlooked, to make it more immersive.
The look target on Link made me wish there was a video on your channel that goes into detail on stuff like that. IK, Headtracking and similar seem so effortless (and are often overlooked because they're meant to), but I find them and the work that goes into them fascinating
Did you know Link has an animation when he hits his head on a low bar/door frame or maybe ceiling (I haven't tested it) I tried this out at the paddock place next to Zelda's House and Link does a squat sort of animation
One of my favorite animations he does that is that pivot he'll do if you're sprinting and do a 180. The little skid, turn, then take off is really satisfying.
With certain cues, like a slope for example, a leaning pose can be mixed in with standard animations and retain the original animations with the modifier altering it in real time along with collision. A standard running, running up and running down slopes animation can all be 1 animation with angle detection on his feet modifying his pose posture slightly, so it would be 1 animation, 3 posture keyframes interpolated in. His head would basically be the same, but the detection would be placed in front of him to detect a slope earlier than he arrives at it. Crafting transition poses is more about the logic behind key poses and how they interact, which can be so labor intensive glitch-proofing.
BOTW modder here! Since it's the same engine, the animation system is basically the same from the last game with some backend changes. This video is pretty much completely accurate, except that the fast walk in between jogging and walking is apparently just interpolated between the two. I don't remember for TOTK, but for BOTW the turn animations were NOT mirrored, and there were separate files for the left and right variants of everything. As you speculated, it's making heavy use of animation blending. The animation scripts check the stick position each frame and then pick which animation to play, and I believe they also determine when to play the turning animations. But, those might also just be blended from the in-place pivots like you said. All the animations for drawing and holding different weapons are definitely blended in as well. All hair and clothing movement is done with real-time cloth physics, none of it is hand-animated. Really good video! You're basically spot-on for 95% of it.
Wow, I WAY undershot with just 10. I love how your channel highlights just how much work goes into the tiny details that most players will barely notice.
i didnt even guess the total, but having worked in animations for 2d games my guess was "orders of magnetude bigger than what i work with", my rough estimate was pretty close as what i guessed was "way bigger than 10" which 30+ falls onto =D
one of my favorite details with link walking around is the change in his footsteps depending on what he has on. If the set he has on includes shoes/footwear you get the basic footstep sound effects, but if you have him barefoot (or wear armor sets without shoes, like from the charged armor set) his footsteps on every surface noticeably change to sound like he's actually barefoot! I don't remember if this was in botw or not, but I've played both for a good amount of time and I've only noticed it in totk
My guess was 24, but with your added contexts it shot up to 34. Although being privy with animation as well, I do think the number is actually lower in the context that you provided. Because a turn animation being mirrored is perhaps not an extra piece of animation. To me, its the same as counting any inverse kinestethics or whatever technical automations that the animations use to simulate variety. And that is the real tricky part about counting the animations. Perhaps the animations are so well blended that, a blended piece of animation looks like another piece of animation. Link wading through water might just be a slight blend into another animation, combining just 1 animation with the rest of his walking/running animations, meaning its just 1 extra piece of animation rather than multiple. My real question about character walk animations is the adaptive nature that the animations must do to make player movement believable. I dont know how these animations are stitched togheter and then programmed to start/blend/stop with the players inputs. I really dont know how games manage this, is there rules as to what speeds a player can walk? Or is the speed really a spectrum? If it is a spectrum then the animations will play slower/faster, right? Even in SM64, you can walk super slow and mario will still shuffle akwardly, or maybe it was sunshine, I forget. I guess animation illusions still work in games to hide the flaws in player movement.
Wow! I had never considered how each of these would need to be their own animation. They really did a great job on the details here I can't wait to play this game I'm finally going to get around to it.
The amount of tiny details this game has is absolutely insane. You don't even consciously notice them unless you're actively looking, but they make the game so much better. The extra year we had to wait for the devs to polish Tears of the Kingdom could not have been more worth it, I can't even begin to imagine the amount of work that must have went into this game. MASSIVE respect to everyone who helped make this absolute masterpiece.
My favourite run pivot 180 animation in games is Ratchet's 180 pivot in the movie tie-in game. In that game when you go from full run to full run 180 away Ratchet does this cool crouch turn which looks great. The thing I like about it specifically is by wiggling the left stick laterally at just the right rhythm you can cause the pivot animation to keep blending into itself resulting in Ratchet being caught in the middle of the animation for an extended period of time leading him to look like he's doing a silly crouch dance. Messing with pivot animations in other games can lead to similar results especially if the animation uses blending or automated techniques. For example, wiggling the left stick/movement keys at the right rhythm in Deus Ex Human Revolution while snapped to standing cover causes Jensen to do a dance as can be caught blending between his left and right cover animation. This led to a popular video where Jensen does the dance with the song Safety Dance that has led to me referring to this kind of animation oddity as Safety Dances.
woah I said 32-36. glad I was close (and also happy you didn't include crouching or holding weapons cause if you did I knew I was going to be way off) This video was so awesome and I was just smiling the whole time. As i've been learning how to make my own games more and more (and purchasing animations, learning how to make my own and programming them) I've come to appreciate animators and the work that goes into video game animation. a lot of love and care goes into it. Awesome video!
The most difficult challenge the animators had to face was probably making link this attractive :) Jokes aside, great video :D This is just fuel to make me want to become an animator even more, thanks!
It would be great doing an analysis of movement mechanics evolution on Zelda 3D games, maybe they could include DS ones, but it's amazing how movement has evolved from n64 to now
Wow great video! When you first asked the question admittedly all i thought about were the different walking/jogging/sprinting cycles as well as the uphill and down hill variants. Initially it was about 12-18 but I got hella surprised by the end.Lovin’ the content, keep it up!
while replaying the game for the second time i noticed a lot of details while on the great sky island, and one of them was that the one-handed sword w/ no shield walk cycle looks pretty damn cool.
It's impressive to see how they really pull out all the stops when it comes to animating Link. Back in the days of the N64, Link has special code to read his animations directly from ROM, even though this is much slower than copying into RAM and reading from there like every other actor does. The reason is that his animation file is so large that if it were copied into the N64's 4MB RAM, there'd be no space left for anything else.
I would have thought that after making the invisible target for lookahead gestures, the head turning during direction changes would just be the same mechanic. I wonder what happens if you walk in circles near an NPC so that sometimes you get into their attention radius. Does he snap from the lookahead in the turn to the NPC or is it a smooth transition (i.e. the view target splines between them)
I just tested it, and he just turns his head to look at NPCs like normal. So to answer your question, it smoothly transitions with a quick head turn just like when he's standing idle and an NPC walks into his view (like 12:09). Seems like looking at points of interest is prioritized over other more subtle head animations like looking into the turn.
I think an interesting thing to look at is how if he's looking at something his eyes move towards it. Sometimes something will be a little further past the way his head can turn, so he looks at it out of the corner of his eye. I don't believe his eye's move if he's looking at the terrain ahead of him, but I don't have the game on me to check.
@@mallk238 that certainly mimics how real people look. We look with our eyes and then turn our head. It's fascinating to dissect these systems and see the care with which they were built.
YES! I love this vid! And if you ever (for some reason) have doubts that his wading animations are set up differently, one of my favorite oddities in BOTW was carrying a snowball through shallow water. Link puts so much brainpower into wading that he forgets to keep his hands under the snowball (ie., they forgot to allow the system to combine "holding round object" and "wading"), and they pan outward as if he's holding some large box. I could loop back and forth between water and land like that for so long laughing my ass off. That reminds me, I need to see if that's been fixed in TOTK. I hope not. It's so funny.
And yet the thing I learned the most was at 12:15 when you revealed the sword training guy gets new swords you can "borrow" if you run out of weapons. I thought it was just the two down in the shelter were free...
The absurd details in the best Nintendo animations are just one of those things that make them an amazing studio. From 3D Mario games, to ARMS or Zelda or even old mainstays like F-Zero. It's six years old, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the animations of ARMS :D
I guessed 36 right off the bat! I love these videos Dan, thank you for doing stuff like this, it's so intriguing the amount of effort that goes into the tiniest things.
there are probably at least 3 different step up animations judging on what happens in BOTW with Bow Lift Smuggle Slide: Bow Lift Smuggling has an effect that locks you into non-looping animations, and both of the step up animations in that game had a trigger to remove gravity from link, and then if you're holding an object like a stone, pot, or most commonly remote bomb, then you can be pushed around by it at ludicrous speeds. There are two different forms of BLSS because of how link holds the item with vs without arrows. With arrows, any step up will work. without arrows any small ledge will cause link to remain mostly still, but a medium ledge that is still much smaller than the one you showed will allow you to spin the joystick and accelerate (spinning the joystick on a smaller ledge will cause erratic "teleportation"). I don't think you could step up onto ledges as tall as the one you showed in the video at all in botw, but if you could it didn't work for either blss... I definitely need to check to make sure though, but that will have to wait until tomorrow for me...
i suspect his head turn as he runs also follows the invisible point in front of him, telling his head which direction to face, which allows it to dynamically addapt to more or less severe turns dynamically without each being animated separately.
The longer the video went on the more the different animation names (as they stacked up in the upper right corner) started to sound like Tony Hawk skate tricks.
the game uses lots of FinalIK (or similar system) for at least the lower body (noticing that the upper and lower body are animated separately when looking at the in-game animations), FIK basically makes the feet to always try to be on the floor using ray tracing (really noticeable when stop/run cycling as the feet like to overcorrect themselves)
To answer a couple of the common questions and responses:
1. "Couldn't a bunch of these animations just be mirrored?"
Yep! Quite a few of these turns and pivots are likely completely symmetrical. But the game engine is (probably) not mirroring anything at run time. The left and right versions of each animations are usually separate animation assets, with the mirroring being done manually by the animators ahead of time.
2. "Technically speaking, not all of these are 'animations'. Some of them are more likely system-driven or code-driven motion."
Also true! While many of these turns and transitions and such COULD be achieved with additional animation assets, many of them are more likely set up some other more efficient way under the hood. I've mostly treated them as additional "animations" here for the sake of simplicity, to avoid getting too deep into the technical weeds trying to explain systems that may or may not be involved. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to make that "rough estimate" caveat up front and then spent a few minutes emphasizing the impact of technical systems toward the end.
Really, animation-counting like this in hopes of getting an EXACT tally is a fool's errand: individual animation assets are only half the picture and we can only speculate about what else is happening under the hood. This video is more about providing a glimpse at that hidden complexity than about fussing over the number itself.
"... This video is more about providing a glimpse at that hidden complexity than about fussing over the number itself."
A critical point that is still so often forgotten by consumers of most products. The details behind how something ends up from an initial idea through to a delivered product takes a lot more work then is generally given credit. Increased consumer awareness can then help drive discussions and priorities around what players care about and elevate quality to meet their expectations.
Great topic and coverage and I'd be interested to see more specific game examples broken down in this fashion 👏
From what ive seen, im pretty sure a lot of links animations are code driven.
I remember seeing a video talking about the tech behind links climbing animations and how they automatically map his hands to the surface of the object hes climbing so im guessing a lot of his other animations are similar.
The Level of detail is incredible, you have earnt a sub
I only thought 300 (i thought u meant frame by frame)
hey,big fan btw can you make a video about the spark the eletric jester games on steam? they are a lot like sonic games but have diffrant animations for stuff like combat or the stratigic gameplay.
It'd be interesting to see how many animations Mario uses in Mario 64 to get a comparison for how much the complexity has increased over time.
I'd say about 4 animations for; walking, running, leaning left layer, and leaning right layer.
@@TheEmeraldSword04 Mario's various stopping and about-face animations are extremely important to gameplay. They are platformers, and those things are timing & move state markers.
Mario's code in Super Mario 64 has 208 animations total, including cutscene animations. The lean (and head turn) is driven directly by code, which makes sense for that era of game. Categorizing them is a bit of a challenge, but I'd list: tiptoe start, tiptoe, walking, running. There are also two different animations for walking/running while holding a light object, and the slow walk while you have a heavy object in your hands, and they're replacements, not additives. The Super Mario 64 engine didn't support additive animations.
And that's not including all of the animations for things like pushing up against a wall / sidling it, or the many ways you can sliding down hills! Even in older games, there's far more animations than you think :)
pretty sure mario has Idle,Move start,sneak*3, walk *3, run*3, maybe more than 1 run animation, fact is that old games dont have blends or so they need to make sure that EVERYTHING is animated.
@@JasperRLZ I'm not sure what driven directly by code means. Do models still have rigs or is it something totally different?
Makes me realize I really don't know that much about animation in games of that era. I suppose they might use some techniques that are totally archaic today.
8:27 I didn't realise how cute Link looks going downhill. He looks like a kid in a Studio Ghibli film going off exploring.
it's one of my favorite animations of his!
It's so normal to get your paraglider out when going downhill that I think a lot of people (myself included) don't see this cute animation ^^
right? its amazing xD
ma boii
Yea I immediately got Totoro vibes with Mei and Satsuki running up and down hills!
I've worked on many games over the years, so my guess was a lot higher, closer to 60 :). But then you decided to ignore stuff like crouching and strafing. And if you want a bit of a datamined spoiler, checking Breath of the Wild, Link has 20 animation files for walking, and 32 animation files for running, not including strafing, crouching, or the step-over stuff you mention, and not including any runtime animation systems. I'll let you theorize on which ones you missed (and let me know if you're curious to know the answer).
Thanks, as always, for putting all of our hard work in context. Games always take far more work and labor than most people can imagine.
Ooo thanks for the datamined details! Also, your channel rules. :D
@@NewFramePlus ❤Really glad to hear you enjoy it, you've been a huge inspiration what I make. And thanks for covering the Sonic games so I don't have to.
My guess for walking was 20 as a complete amature, so this comment made me feel pretty smart
We need the answers so baddddddddd
@@JasperRLZYOOOO NICE TO SEE U HERE
I don't know if this counts, but Link also has a sliding animation for going down really steep hills. It would probably have some other animations attached to it as well.
I really thought I was being clever guessing six -R
Good to see you here, big fan!
Well, well, fancy seeing you here.
meanwhile I'm here having guessed in the ballpark of 150 because I didn't think to count the upper-body animations as a separate layer.
IM NOT JOKING I ACTUALLY GUESSED 36 IN THE BEGINNING THEN CHANGED IT TO 38 🫡
@@Asaspecimenyesimextraoddinaryliar
When Link looks up and down at hills and cliffs, that’s actually a new animation that didn’t return from BotW. It really cool to think that super small things like that can still be added to a game like BotW.
Tears of the Kingdom is such a GOOD GAME.
this game is ridiculously good. like, one of my favorite things to do is just watch how link moves around in the world. sometimes i'll just walk around for a while and appreciate all the little details they managed to cram into this short king. my favorite animation has to be when he ascends and he shakes his head a bit. then, depending on the terrain, he'll either hop out or just climb out.
this is my new favorite game.
@@ryanadolfi4007
Another little detail I noticed was that Link holds 1 and 2 handed weapons differently depending on if they are fused or not.
Unfused 1 handed weapons are pointed down towards the ground, while fused weapons are horizontal to the ground. 2 handed weapons are twisted so the material points upward in his hands compared to unfused.
I can’t tell any differences for spears.
I mean its ok, nothing groundbreaking
TotK is probably a better game than BotW on average, but at the same time has worse flaws in places.
The way you use the champions' powers is often cited, but my pet peeve is the ring menu for powers of the tablet. It's slow, inaccurate and it's even worse if you use joycons :( I think the game also makes you switch from one power to another more often, due to how important some of them are. Ring menus worked much better in TP and SS.
The animation is definitely solid though.
@@chargegarg8234 totally fair. it definitely has some flaws (the frame rate can be kinda rough). it's still a joy for me though, personally
The craziest thing about all these animations is that they all have specific sounds based on your clothing, if you walk or run with a shield, sword and bow together, based on what weapons you're carrying around, based on the floor and according to the structure, since there is a difference between open and closed places. The sound design of this game is insane.
If you're using a set that allows you to walk more silently, the sounds will change, as well if you're using a monster mask, since the way Link approaches enemies is slightly different. Crazy.
I loved being a little goblin stanced lizalfos for the entirety of my playthrough's second half
Someone once pointed out that link's voice gets louder and softer based on how close he is to the camera. if he's closer to the camera he's a lot louder. idk if that's impressive or not, but I thought it was interesting that they made the sound come from his character instead of just letting it be something the player always hears (since he's always right THERE anyway)
@@mallk238Same thing happens with the paraglider, the closer the camera is to him, the louder it sounds
The idea that nothing is "for free" in game development is a very important thing people overlook. You have to code in things specifically and can't take it for granted. If you want a stop animation for walking, you gotta put that in. If you want a game to return to the main menu if you back out, you have to put that in. So many little details we don't even think about when playing a game have to be deliberately put in and tweaked. I have a lot of respect for anyone in the industry, and it's great to see a channel like this continually highlighting the hard work that goes into deceptively simple things.
I try to explain this every time someone asks for a feature to be added to a game, and says to anyone who disagrees "It's just an option, you don't have to use it." No matter how simple you think that option is, it takes time to develop, test, fix, and support that option; time that could be spent on any number of other things instead.
@@Nibbieful I think the same thing about movies. I remember when endgame came out, a lot of people were like "they should've included a scene where X happens!" and every time I wanted to go "THREE HOURS, guys. This movie is three hours long. If they added anything else in it's gonna add up!"
If someone has zero experience with the process that goes into making something, it can be really hard to conceptualize just how much work has to go into it. The ironic thing is, the more well made something is, the less people will realize how incredible it is; since it will follow exactly what they expect to happen in their heads.
It's especially moreso when you need the game to be optimized to heck and back. But with enough engine power, many things, while not strictly "for free" can be done in-engine or be premade assets outright, which significantly reduces the development time as well. Of course, you then tend to get a lot of games that looks/feels identical because of that, and we literally have a term for such: Asset flips.
CGI too. People will act like CGI is some lazy soulless practice when its arguably much more labour intensive and difficult than practical effects. Practical effects gets so much detail and quality for free that CGI needs to have done manually.
This just makes me realize how complex human movement is and how much work has to go into selling that this is a person, that when characters have weight to them it's because of all these elements coming together. Some of these changes are so small and imperceptible, but without them I'm sure we'd say that a character felt more "weightless" or "stiff" or "floaty" in their animations.
I guessed 40 animations and came a lot closer than I thought I would! I’ve never worked with 3D animation before but I understand enough to know the effort that goes into it. Great video!
That was my guess too.
I did too, but then thought "you're thinking that because the video clearly goes for a lot. So depending on how walking is defined here, the base shouldn't really be more than 20." And while I am in the camp that some stuff might not need to be counted indiviually (like the L/R variations), even with those together it's way over 20 :D
I guessed 6..
My first guess was 40, then I wondered how deep into 'just movement' we would go and I thought, or 80. But definitely not anything in between.
It's a great day when you get a New Frame Plus upload
Link also has a bunch of different movement animation sets for some of his different armor. For example, when he wears the Yiga armor he moves more like a Yiga, without directly copying the Yiga footsoldier movements. Similarly, in BotW he had very different set of animations when he was dressed as a Gerudo vai.
Link's tracking of the upcoming obstacle blew my mind. It's so subtle, but I have to imagine took hours to program. It's something that most people will probably subconsiously notice, but never once actually register as a fully formed thought unless you're *really* looking for it like you are. Just another example of that Nintendo quality.
Also I guessed 20 thinking I went way over, and ended up barely guessing above half of the actual answer.
"Hours to program" is underselling how much effort even small things take. You have to build an entire system around making a target for Link's head and pivoting it to face the target. Then you have to validate that against all kinds of scenarios. Take every single animation for Link in this game and multiply it by the number of things Link can look at, and that's the number of things you have to validate in a test sandbox. Then you need to do that again every time there's a systemic change that might impact it, and across the time of development there are inevitably many changes like that.
Features like this can be a years-long process to fully implement.
@@FearlessSonto program, probably an hour or two, maybe even less tbh. to add data for all the items he could look towards, set thresholds depending on the current animation, that's the part that sounds like it'd take a ton of time
@@Temulgeh My point is that this kind of thing is a process. You can't drill it down to an hour or two. It intersects with so many other systems that you'll be adjusting and programming it across the length of the project.
(I'm speaking as someone who writes test automation for a living.)
@@LTNetjak Yeah, that's what I'm taking about. In games in particular even "simple" things often end up being the most complicated to fully implement, whether those be doors or turning a head to look at something (see also that infamous slow-mo clip from an American football game that has a player's head spinning 360 degrees trying to follow the ball.)
I'd say it's a lot less effort than you think, but it's a very elegant solution: Think of it as functioning similar to the camera, it's basically an invisible object with it's own ai that by default goes in front of the player character. Said object is affected by terrain, so it'll adjust to such, and also has an object detection where it would move towards any object of interest. And... that's pretty much all there is to it. In the same way the camera object is a very simple, but elegant solution to how to handle player vision in 3ird person games, and in fact I wouldn't be surprized if this invisible object uses very similar coding to camera objects.
Of course the animation of the head turning is it's own thing, but head turning animation is a solved problem, you aren't doing anything new with this, which just provides a direction for the head to look at. (well, head turning animation SHOULD be since it's literally following camera animation logic, but some games still gets it wrong so I dunno)
I remember looking through the game files for GRIS and there's *a lot* of transitions there, each of them represented by at least 12 separate frames. There's even a difference between transition "cube form to swimming" and "falling to swimming"
Certain things like the head tilt when turning and the torso leaning are likely not separate animations, but simple bone modifiers; similar to how Link moves his head to look at NPCs or objects of interest. Really neat breakdown video!
Hey, if you haven't heard of it, you should check out the hand-painted game, The Masters Pupil. It's an adventure puzzle platformer coming out this month on the 28th and, as I said earlier, the game's assets were hand-painted onto actual paper. I am in no way affiliated with the devs, but I've been seeing their social media and I think it'd be really interesting to look at! I'm curious about the challenges that come with the method and if, in your opinion, it was worth it!
12:50 Yeah he definitely has that permanent marker in front of him. If you press X twice while running, he will also only take out the paraglider if the hill his running on is sloped far enough down that he will be able to have it out for a minimum amount of time. The only way Nintendo could do this is with a marker like that.
Ehh, no, not necessarily the “only” way. I always assumed being able to run, jump, and glide off a slope was a result of *just* enough distance being made between you and the ground as you’re jumping forward that the game lets you take out the paraglider.
To be fair, if they have an empty that’s already tracking elevation ahead of Link, I wouldn’t put it past the devs to also use it to check if there’s enough of a drop ahead that it’d be reasonable to take out the paraglider.
Personally, I think my theory is the more likely of the two since the latter would be likely to introduce bugs and generally be way too finicky to implement effectively; also, why? I can’t think of a scenario in the game where your idea would be the ideal solution when the game already naturally takes care of situations like “Link running down a hill, jumping and trying to paraglide” by having a minimum distance from the ground from which he can paraglide.*
*OR: even more simply, only letting Link paraglide if he’s in (or entering, in the case of a slope) one of his many non-ragdoll falling animations. This I could see being the most likely implementation since you can paraglide just before hitting the ground from a fall, but cannot paraglide when jumping on flat ground.
i feel like this video could've just kept going forever, and id be sitting here mesmerized at all the different lil tiny details and animations that make Link's movement feel as good as it does. Very epic and cool.
Love this!! I considered doing a video on Link's animations in TotK but ultimately decided I don't have the games experience to do more than appreciate and point at what I *am* able to notice, so I'm stoked you decided to approach the topic! I guessed 25, but I wasn't even thinking about crouching, strafing, etc! And that look-target antic touch is incredible. Thanks for sharing!!
Hey Dan did you notice they actually removed an animation from botw? When link walked on logs in botw he lifted his arms and looked down trying to balance himself but he doesn't do that anymore in totk, my guess would be because since you can make vehicles with logs now the animation would make no sense in a log boat for instance, but in my mind that would also be easy to account for? (If log is not attached to other objects do animation)
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that...
Slightly more complicated than that: You could stack logs lenght-wise and suddenly the animation would make sense again. And perhaps it'd make sense for other objects too, but only in certain configurations.
I'm sure there was a good reason why they left it out, and complexity-to-account-for vs value added to experience likely was it
I noticed this. I kind of take it as Link being more confident in heights now that he's had more experience with heights and paragliding.
@Kram1032 i honestly never noticed it in botw! then again, i never cut down trees to make a bridge in that game. i'd usually just jump whatever gap there was and climb the rest of the way up. still a neat detail 🙂
I think the most likely reason would be that the balance animation conflicted with the new one-handed animation(s) for the Zonai powers but since I am not an animator my guess is less educated than any of Dan's.
I just love how smooth and satisfying the editing is.
Whether it’d be the physical notification of whatever we’re counting as an animation, the smooth transitional process of changing the clip or scene, or just the in general THE INTRO SEQUENCE. Is it just me or am I obsessed with the way the words move??? (Yes, it’s just me.)
The background music and sound effects add onto the video feel and feed into overall theming is fun and natural. Like every time the notification goes “bloop” and it slides down. I don’t know, it feels good.
Gotta say, I love your editing style, and the completeness and depth of your research. I grow in appreciation for game development and animation after I watch your videos. Keep it up!
when he walks over like a log or something similar that requires balance, he puts his arms out and looks down more, and the position of his arms change depending on how fast you go. It looks absolutely adorable to see him balance like that for some reason, it's my favourite animation.
Only in botw tho
Heh, love the use of the "try to grab a weapon" animation at the end to pull out the final count! My very rough guess was about 15 - I had figured out walk/run (didn't realize there was a fast walk), out of stamina (but not sprint, weirdly), the 180 degree turn, and "I definitely haven't remembered everything so let's tack on one more", and then multiplied it by 3 to include uphill/downhill. The bit about the dynamic sightlines on slopes and stuff was fascinating!
I love the jog downhill animation, likw how his arms open to help with his balance like how he is a little afraid of falling
Say what you will about Nintendo, but they always press to nail the basics of locomotion and controllability in their games.
Seeing how in-depth Link's basic running and walking goes in TotK reminds me of those stories where the devs spent months just focusing on Mario's movement, making sure it felt right before building anything else. It's really cool to see!
no joke, even walking in this game feels so satisfying
11:34 "Inverse Kinematics" I've gotta remember that one: when characters' feet shift position to match the terrain they're on, that's my favorite animation detail that tells me, "oh, these game devs were CAREFUL"
I love that in the middle you point out how all of this had to be made. So many people take so many aspects of games and animated works for granted cause they just watch it happen and work. But it's not like actors, or things that exist in the real world normally, in fake spaces like this every single individual aspect has to be created, made by someone, or multiple people and then correctly implemented. Obviously engines help make this possible, creating consistent rules and systems, like links hair isn't actually animated, it just does what the physics of the engine say it should do. But for the most part, there's an absolute ton of work that goes into even the small details of these works and I really appreciate you just taking a small extra moment to remind people of that within the video. Even tho your entire channel makes it obvious.
One of the animations I love is the quick turnaround-- when Link's running forward then immediately has to run backwards. There's a great sound associated with that too!
My guess as an absolute minimum for the different states of movement was 4 animations: One for idling, walking, jogging and sprinting, with the caveat that you could add animations for various other scenarios like turning, as well as stuff like Inverse Kinematics and physics animation, to make the movement feel smoother and more complete. I failed to take into account crouching, strafing and blending animations.
This is a good breakdown, thank you for making it!
12:48 : That's an amazing touch! Was that system in Breath of the Wild?
I have a mild phobia of heights and specifically ledges, and while there are plenty of those in BotW, I felt hyper-aware of them in TotK and it was weirdly stressful.
If Link is 'aware' of the ledge and reacting to it, maybe that's what I was picking up on.
(Also weird, that sensation entirely went away as soon as I got the Paraglider.)
He does not! He just looks straight ahead regardless. It was something added to totk!
This is such a fascinating watch in the context of working in Dreams where all of these animations can be covered by all the slider settings for the procedurally animated base character.
You have really made me appreciate the little animations in the sonic games and I'm glad you cover Zelda stuff too.
There’s a lot of little animations that I didn’t even notice, and I’ve been playing as this Link for 6 years! Great work to all the animators on the Zelda team! The only artist I could find online is Satoru Takizawa, but I’m sure there were more people who worked on animation.
This video was an absolute treat! As I'm not really knowledgeable about animation generally it's always fun to gain a new appreciation for the animations that blend in the background and I sometimes take for granted.
the most interesting video about just walking I've ever seen.
I love how this also doesn't get into all of the custom animations that result from Link using his various hand abilities wilst moving. You can move in all the aforementioned directions while using Ascend, which in and of itself is also technically locomotion, just upwards. Similarly, moving with ultrahand, fuse, and autobuild all have subtly different animations or unique things Link can do *all while walking*.
Given the fact that there are 8 chest-opening animations or something like that, I knew that grounded movement would have a ton of animations.
One other neat non-locomotion animation I found was with recall. Fuse and ascend have their own singular (or 4 for fuse) animation and the Ultrahand just turns you into the direction you are aiming. But you can't do that with recall because it neatly stops time. So when you recall an object in the bottom left corner of the screen Link will actually move his hand to his left hip to reach the object. That's probably some inverse kinematic game logic stuff but I like it.
Also I have noticed for clothing that there seem to be parts that are affected by physics and points where the clothes are pinned to Link's body. Especially noticeable with the thunder attack body piece.
ALSO I have noticed the many different weapon holsters you have for your melee weapons! Most fabricated weapons (no sticks) have one which goes away when fused and turns into a generic belt loop, the only deviant being the master sword which never looses its sheath due to magic blade-ness. Weapons with sheaths include all the standart weapons like knight, soldier or royal, the boomerang and the amiibo weapons, probably more. Zonaite weapons are weirdly excempt. Spears just have a little loop but I think that also changes. It's just so neat having this little barely noticeable detail.
A lot of the counted animations here could just be hard coded model rotations or IK or controlling the speed/position of the animation. The animation bootcamp GDC talk does a great job showing how a lot can be done manually without explicit animations. I'd say leaning, slowing down, and a lot of the standing pivots can probably be done without unique animations. Might be wrong ofc, more careful observation could disprove this. Good stuff!
I'm so happy to see anything popping up from this channel, and couldn't be more excited to see it's a TotK video! :o
I guessed 30, which I’m pretty happy with considering my complete lack of animation experience.
This was fascinating! Too easy to take this kind of work for granted, I’m glad the relatively clueless like myself have someone like you to show just how much effort and talent goes into making animation so functional and stylish.
My guess was "A hundred or two", and. Given what you left -out-, I feel content in the accuracy of my guess.
Ocarina of Time actually did the inverse kinematics for feet being on different elevations way back in 1998. Same with Links head looking at objects, afaik.
The Spyro remakes also had Spyro looking down if there was a cliff or drop.
This is not a who did it first video though.
2 videos in 2 weeks? Oh my god, is this a Christmas miracle!? Thank you!
6:23 that music... my god. I haven't heard these drums since I was a kid! Wonderful choice for the background music, and a very informational video!
Now stand and walk around slowly with a Kilton mask for Bokoblin, Moblin, Horriblin, Lizalfo, and Lynel disguises. Each has some extra cute roleplaying animations and sounds.
I guessed exactly half the total. Which is wild given they favored snappiness, it feels like some animations are left out to make Link more responsive.
Maybe his shuffling when turning is the inverse kinematics calculating again where to put his feet combined with the walk start animation.
Thanks man you gave me some items to add onto my template as I am making my TOTK animations videos.. there’s also the low gravity areas where Links jump animation is different…he has an idle animation looking at his right hand… it’s crazy these little things developers add that take so long to perfect ,but often get overlooked, to make it more immersive.
he also has animations related to getting up when ragdolled, which despite being there since botw, i find super cool
Ooo i guessed 40, and i'm guessing more than a few of these were procedurals, so imma say i was spot-on
The look target on Link made me wish there was a video on your channel that goes into detail on stuff like that. IK, Headtracking and similar seem so effortless (and are often overlooked because they're meant to), but I find them and the work that goes into them fascinating
Did you know Link has an animation when he hits his head on a low bar/door frame or maybe ceiling (I haven't tested it) I tried this out at the paddock place next to Zelda's House and Link does a squat sort of animation
One of my favorite animations he does that is that pivot he'll do if you're sprinting and do a 180. The little skid, turn, then take off is really satisfying.
With certain cues, like a slope for example, a leaning pose can be mixed in with standard animations and retain the original animations with the modifier altering it in real time along with collision. A standard running, running up and running down slopes animation can all be 1 animation with angle detection on his feet modifying his pose posture slightly, so it would be 1 animation, 3 posture keyframes interpolated in. His head would basically be the same, but the detection would be placed in front of him to detect a slope earlier than he arrives at it. Crafting transition poses is more about the logic behind key poses and how they interact, which can be so labor intensive glitch-proofing.
BOTW modder here! Since it's the same engine, the animation system is basically the same from the last game with some backend changes. This video is pretty much completely accurate, except that the fast walk in between jogging and walking is apparently just interpolated between the two. I don't remember for TOTK, but for BOTW the turn animations were NOT mirrored, and there were separate files for the left and right variants of everything.
As you speculated, it's making heavy use of animation blending. The animation scripts check the stick position each frame and then pick which animation to play, and I believe they also determine when to play the turning animations. But, those might also just be blended from the in-place pivots like you said. All the animations for drawing and holding different weapons are definitely blended in as well. All hair and clothing movement is done with real-time cloth physics, none of it is hand-animated.
Really good video! You're basically spot-on for 95% of it.
Wow, I WAY undershot with just 10.
I love how your channel highlights just how much work goes into the tiny details that most players will barely notice.
i didnt even guess the total, but having worked in animations for 2d games my guess was "orders of magnetude bigger than what i work with", my rough estimate was pretty close as what i guessed was "way bigger than 10" which 30+ falls onto =D
one of my favorite details with link walking around is the change in his footsteps depending on what he has on. If the set he has on includes shoes/footwear you get the basic footstep sound effects, but if you have him barefoot (or wear armor sets without shoes, like from the charged armor set) his footsteps on every surface noticeably change to sound like he's actually barefoot! I don't remember if this was in botw or not, but I've played both for a good amount of time and I've only noticed it in totk
My guess was 24, but with your added contexts it shot up to 34.
Although being privy with animation as well, I do think the number is actually lower in the context that you provided. Because a turn animation being mirrored is perhaps not an extra piece of animation. To me, its the same as counting any inverse kinestethics or whatever technical automations that the animations use to simulate variety. And that is the real tricky part about counting the animations. Perhaps the animations are so well blended that, a blended piece of animation looks like another piece of animation. Link wading through water might just be a slight blend into another animation, combining just 1 animation with the rest of his walking/running animations, meaning its just 1 extra piece of animation rather than multiple.
My real question about character walk animations is the adaptive nature that the animations must do to make player movement believable. I dont know how these animations are stitched togheter and then programmed to start/blend/stop with the players inputs. I really dont know how games manage this, is there rules as to what speeds a player can walk? Or is the speed really a spectrum? If it is a spectrum then the animations will play slower/faster, right? Even in SM64, you can walk super slow and mario will still shuffle akwardly, or maybe it was sunshine, I forget. I guess animation illusions still work in games to hide the flaws in player movement.
I am in love with the downhill running animation, especially with speed buffs
Wow! I had never considered how each of these would need to be their own animation. They really did a great job on the details here I can't wait to play this game I'm finally going to get around to it.
didn't even touch on all the the climbing, swimming and combat animations, hadn't even thought of how much work this all must be before your video!
The amount of tiny details this game has is absolutely insane. You don't even consciously notice them unless you're actively looking, but they make the game so much better.
The extra year we had to wait for the devs to polish Tears of the Kingdom could not have been more worth it, I can't even begin to imagine the amount of work that must have went into this game. MASSIVE respect to everyone who helped make this absolute masterpiece.
My favourite run pivot 180 animation in games is Ratchet's 180 pivot in the movie tie-in game. In that game when you go from full run to full run 180 away Ratchet does this cool crouch turn which looks great. The thing I like about it specifically is by wiggling the left stick laterally at just the right rhythm you can cause the pivot animation to keep blending into itself resulting in Ratchet being caught in the middle of the animation for an extended period of time leading him to look like he's doing a silly crouch dance.
Messing with pivot animations in other games can lead to similar results especially if the animation uses blending or automated techniques.
For example, wiggling the left stick/movement keys at the right rhythm in Deus Ex Human Revolution while snapped to standing cover causes Jensen to do a dance as can be caught blending between his left and right cover animation. This led to a popular video where Jensen does the dance with the song Safety Dance that has led to me referring to this kind of animation oddity as Safety Dances.
I'm expecting like 150 for total animations, and like 50 for default animations that Dan will talk about, I'm excited to see how wrong/right I'll be.
Animation aside i LOVE your very subtle music choices throughout the video (especially around the shot with purah). Nicely done, Dan XD
The joy i got to hear u use ravios theme at the start of the video cannot be explained in words
woah I said 32-36. glad I was close (and also happy you didn't include crouching or holding weapons cause if you did I knew I was going to be way off)
This video was so awesome and I was just smiling the whole time.
As i've been learning how to make my own games more and more (and purchasing animations, learning how to make my own and programming them) I've come to appreciate animators and the work that goes into video game animation. a lot of love and care goes into it.
Awesome video!
The most difficult challenge the animators had to face was probably making link this attractive :)
Jokes aside, great video :D
This is just fuel to make me want to become an animator even more, thanks!
It would be great doing an analysis of movement mechanics evolution on Zelda 3D games, maybe they could include DS ones, but it's amazing how movement has evolved from n64 to now
The amount of polish is astounding.
Wow great video! When you first asked the question admittedly all i thought about were the different walking/jogging/sprinting cycles as well as the uphill and down hill variants. Initially it was about 12-18 but I got hella surprised by the end.Lovin’ the content, keep it up!
Always fun seeing your animation vids!
Kudos! A+ quality work was put into this video.
An animator animating most things: * 500 IQ concentration *
An animator animating walk cycles: * opens his third eye *
Shoutout to Dan continuing to have impeccable music taste for the end slates (assuming he is picking out the music and not Carrie)
while replaying the game for the second time i noticed a lot of details while on the great sky island, and one of them was that the one-handed sword w/ no shield walk cycle looks pretty damn cool.
It's impressive to see how they really pull out all the stops when it comes to animating Link. Back in the days of the N64, Link has special code to read his animations directly from ROM, even though this is much slower than copying into RAM and reading from there like every other actor does. The reason is that his animation file is so large that if it were copied into the N64's 4MB RAM, there'd be no space left for anything else.
I would have thought that after making the invisible target for lookahead gestures, the head turning during direction changes would just be the same mechanic.
I wonder what happens if you walk in circles near an NPC so that sometimes you get into their attention radius. Does he snap from the lookahead in the turn to the NPC or is it a smooth transition (i.e. the view target splines between them)
I just tested it, and he just turns his head to look at NPCs like normal. So to answer your question, it smoothly transitions with a quick head turn just like when he's standing idle and an NPC walks into his view (like 12:09). Seems like looking at points of interest is prioritized over other more subtle head animations like looking into the turn.
@@leetri cool. My suspicion is that looking into the turn is just another example of looking at a point of interest, just with lower priority.
I think an interesting thing to look at is how if he's looking at something his eyes move towards it. Sometimes something will be a little further past the way his head can turn, so he looks at it out of the corner of his eye. I don't believe his eye's move if he's looking at the terrain ahead of him, but I don't have the game on me to check.
@@mallk238 that certainly mimics how real people look. We look with our eyes and then turn our head. It's fascinating to dissect these systems and see the care with which they were built.
I'd note that this head turning animation isn't just for Link, but for NPCs too, who will turn to look at link the same way Link does with them.
that ravio theme at the start of the video hit me so hard with nostalgia
YES! I love this vid! And if you ever (for some reason) have doubts that his wading animations are set up differently, one of my favorite oddities in BOTW was carrying a snowball through shallow water. Link puts so much brainpower into wading that he forgets to keep his hands under the snowball (ie., they forgot to allow the system to combine "holding round object" and "wading"), and they pan outward as if he's holding some large box. I could loop back and forth between water and land like that for so long laughing my ass off.
That reminds me, I need to see if that's been fixed in TOTK. I hope not. It's so funny.
its over 9000!
And yet the thing I learned the most was at 12:15 when you revealed the sword training guy gets new swords you can "borrow" if you run out of weapons. I thought it was just the two down in the shelter were free...
My man Dan talking about TotK is a pleasant surprise! Really makes me appreciate all the craftsmenship going into these games today.
The absurd details in the best Nintendo animations are just one of those things that make them an amazing studio. From 3D Mario games, to ARMS or Zelda or even old mainstays like F-Zero.
It's six years old, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the animations of ARMS :D
Always thrilled to see a NewFramePlus upload! And my guess was waaay too low, I thinking /maybe/ 20-something XD
I guessed 36 right off the bat! I love these videos Dan, thank you for doing stuff like this, it's so intriguing the amount of effort that goes into the tiniest things.
12:40 Also, he stops looking up when he almost reaches the top of the hill
I guessed a lot higher, but I was also expecting things like crouching and targeting to be taken into consideration
This video really helped me notice and appreciate the massive amount of work and love that the devs put into the game. Great vid
I love this kind of videos, makes me apreciate the effort of the developers even more!
there are probably at least 3 different step up animations judging on what happens in BOTW with Bow Lift Smuggle Slide: Bow Lift Smuggling has an effect that locks you into non-looping animations, and both of the step up animations in that game had a trigger to remove gravity from link, and then if you're holding an object like a stone, pot, or most commonly remote bomb, then you can be pushed around by it at ludicrous speeds.
There are two different forms of BLSS because of how link holds the item with vs without arrows. With arrows, any step up will work. without arrows any small ledge will cause link to remain mostly still, but a medium ledge that is still much smaller than the one you showed will allow you to spin the joystick and accelerate (spinning the joystick on a smaller ledge will cause erratic "teleportation"). I don't think you could step up onto ledges as tall as the one you showed in the video at all in botw, but if you could it didn't work for either blss...
I definitely need to check to make sure though, but that will have to wait until tomorrow for me...
Really looking at these animations gives me an even deeper fascination for it
i suspect his head turn as he runs also follows the invisible point in front of him, telling his head which direction to face, which allows it to dynamically addapt to more or less severe turns dynamically without each being animated separately.
The longer the video went on the more the different animation names (as they stacked up in the upper right corner) started to sound like Tony Hawk skate tricks.
the game uses lots of FinalIK (or similar system) for at least the lower body (noticing that the upper and lower body are animated separately when looking at the in-game animations), FIK basically makes the feet to always try to be on the floor using ray tracing (really noticeable when stop/run cycling as the feet like to overcorrect themselves)