Early this year, the internet was taken over by a very menacing,
very tall woman. Gamers can’t get enough of Lady Dimitrescu,
her great stature and her very massive... hat. And the answer why is obvious...
We're all big rigging fans.
Just like in real life, every player character, enemy, or NPC in a 3D game has a secret skeleton.
Unlike real life, probably, these skeletons are made by artists in a 3D graphics software.
Artists like Sol Brennan. They were a technical artist-slash-rigger on Marvel’s Spider-man.
Sol: But it's fairly safe to say if something's moving, and it's moving in a more dynamic way,
or needs an animator's hands in creating it, it's being driven by a rig.
Jenna: The rig is the backbone of animation.
It contains a series of rigid, interconnected structures (bones), as well as a series of
control points and data about how they should act in relation to each other.
Almost every animation you see in a 3D game relies on the rig for manipulation. Even rag dolls, which
use physics-based procedural animation instead of bespoke human labor, still use a rig. That
way the body maintains a roughly humanoid shape, even though it gets all wibbly at the joints.
Even mocap footage needs a lot of fine detailing. So if you want your game to actually look good,
SOMEbody is going to have to finesse those animations individually. And for that,
you’ll need at least one rig. Luckily, those are easy to find.
Sol: So basically, most game studios will have a rigging tool set that they built, or maybe that
they bought and pay for, that auto-generates a lot of very common components, right, like, as you
said, an arm moves like an arm, you know, there's certain systems that can be used over and over.
Jenna: Some 3D software even comes with pre-made standardized skeletons,
which really cuts down on necromancy costs. On top of that, studios will often reuse the same rig
for a huge number of characters. Aside from Peter and the bosses,
the Humans of New York of Spider-man consist of 5 character types.
Keeping the number of rigs low can save a studio a remarkable amount of time and labor,
allowing more resources to be spent on customizing those rigs with different meshes and animations.
Lots of big boss babies in Monster Hunter share the same bones,
but fighting them feels different because of the work that’s been done to customize them.
So you can have what looks like a wide variety of characters, all sharing one skeleton.
Duplicated, of course, so nobody can claim that mom says it’s their turn to use the skeleton.
Even when a game has a medley of different sized characters, the developers probably
used a base template and customized it from there. In Hades, most of the NPCs start as
either Thanatoses or Megaras, the two genders, and are modified to be smaller or daddier, as needed.
A lot of those hell lords spend their time floating in their respective corners, without
doing much more than idle animations. For other games, making multiple rigs is a much
bigger commitment. While customizing a rig isn’t easy, it pales in comparison to the time spent
animating it, which means adding even just one more skeleton multiplies your labor and costs.
That’s especially true for player characters. Say you wanted to make a male player character
to complement your female main character, and you wanted to make him smaller because
we stan a short king. You can adjust the size of a rig pretty easily. But a smaller skeleton
means narrower shoulders, and hands that are closer together and lower than before. Which
means you can’t just reuse the animations built for the original rig. Your character
now clips through held items, and ladders, and just literally anything they touch.
Consider for a moment the huge number of animations a player character gets.
Gosh, that’s a lot of work! Okay, now double that for a second character rig.
Well golly, that’s twice as much work!
This is why so many studios wisely build their player characters on the same basic rig.
Some customizers will allow a lil wiggle room for characters that are broader
or thinner or a TV dinner featuring BEEFCAKE,
but these are purely cosmetic; it puts more meat on those bones, but the bones remain the same.
Although this is a great time-saver, it has a notable downside. Default rigs tend to start out
pretty thin, and stay that way. There’s an upper and lower limit to what looks natural on a frame,
so you can’t play as someone bigger or smaller than that. And it’s rare that a game will let you
play a character that’s truly thicc. When games DO create a rig that can support broad characters,
it often seems more like a punchline instead of an acknowledgment that
people just come in different shapes.
So games that do let you control your height or width, or have elongated legs or fingers,
they’re actually super powerful, even if they rarely let you be a full-blown 9’6” demigiant.
And inevitably, these systems will have hiccups when it comes to interacting with the world,
because touch is one of the trickiest things to animate.
Sol: You either choose, are their arms going to clip through the mesh, or are they going to float?
And a lot of times, people err on the floating, right? Because it looks better
to have hover hands, than it does to see obvious clipping through the mesh.
Jenna: Which is why some wrestlers in the WWE games get to have just a little telekinesis,
as a treat, and why the touch-heavy cutscenes in The Last of Us, Part II are a technical marvel.
Sol: You know, they have scenes where the characters touch their own face and push the skin
of their own face. That is actually something that has to be customly authored. There's no
way of procedurally authoring that at runtime.
Jenna: Any time any character interacts with anything in a game world,
it means a developer has spent time creating bespoke animations to make it look right. For
really uniquely shaped characters - like, for instance, those too tall to just walk
through a doorway - more attention has to go into the animation. Which is why, of course,
the internet is so into Lady Dimitrescu. We’re just super into animation. We love a big rig.
Whether or not the studio diversifies their character mold depends on how willing they
are to commit employee time and labor into making a super hot tall-- I mean,
to making everything look good. It’s a choice that needs to be made early in the design process.
For Overwatch, Blizzard specifically wanted each character to feel distinct.
Jess Davis: If we had maintained this body type size for all of our heroes, it might have been
more easy for production. But it gets away from the diversity of the cast that you see below.
Jenna: That didn’t mean redesigning the wheel for every character. They developed a workflow
that allowed them to copy some animations, and devote more time to adding flair to what they
call “high visibility forms” - things like running and Play of the Game animations.
But Overwatch still has a lot of repetition in body types. Despite a few really unique shapes,
male characters are overwhelmingly a rectangle, no love for the thick-hip gents. Female characters
mostly have one of two silhouettes: long-leg thin hourglass or long-leg thick hourglass.
On the other hand, some multiplayer games explicitly cannot have different rigs for
different player characters. No matter how much you customize your PUBG or Fortnite character,
it will always have the same skeleton - and the same hitbox - because otherwise a player
might have an unfair advantage. Not to mention, again, the massive amount of animations they’d
need to re-do. Which is terrible news for those of us waiting on Fortnite Babies!
This is why poor Oddjob is so reviled. He’s the only character in Goldeneye 007’s multiplayer
whose rig is shorter than the default gun-aiming level. You have to lower your gun to have any
chance of hitting him, giving the player in his proportionally-smaller shoes a big advantage.
So there are definitely times when reusing the same rig is just smart game-making. Other times,
it can really undercut your world building. Cyberpunk is set in a future where body
modification is explicitly a common practice. Looking around at the people on the street,
you wouldn’t know it. Nobody is rocking a third cyber-arm or bionic legs that make them
super tall. And Cyberpunk must be an alternate universe where furries don’t exist because you
know you’d be seeing wolf legs and prehensile tails everywhere.
Sol: Doing things especially like tentacles,
anything that's like, snakes type shape is actually a very incredibly difficult
thing to animate, and animate consistently. There are things that are difficult to rig,
but a lot of the difficulty in rigging comes from anything that's, that's not standardized.
Jenna: “Not standardized” doesn’t just mean additive features, like the fully rigged
Medusa hair I’m still waiting for a game to give me. It also means having characters that
are missing limbs, which is pretty rare in games. From a rigging standpoint, it takes
a lot less precious time to replace a limb with a prosthetic that functions - and animates - exactly
like a flesh hand. Or, even better, one that makes you a little bit of a superhero!
The rig system means it’s much rarer to have a character operating entirely without a limb,
or to see a prosthetic treated like it functions differently from a ready-made version.
So even though it makes sense aesthetically for Sea of Thieves to have hook-hands and peg legs,
we should appreciate the extra effort they put into the bespoke animations.
And that goes for any time you see a wee lad fighting a bunch of titans,
or a seamless cutscene kiss, or just like… a really BIG lady. The developers have made
a choice to embrace a variety of body shapes and for that I say, thank you.