﻿The Matrix Resurrections is packed with video game references,
most of 'em pretty explicit. But there’s a relatively subtle one snuck in amongst
the corpo speak and Christina Ricci cameo. It’s right here. The treadmill.
Seq: You’re thinking this Modal is a loop? Or a treadmill?
Some sort of sequencer evolving a program to do what?
- To make a dope walking animation, of course!
Okay actually in the movie, the treadmill represents the illusion of progress,
expending lots of effort and energy, without actually going anywhere.
It’s about the futility of nostalgia and the crushing cycle of capitalism
and about learning to see when you’re not actually going anywhere.
Bugs: I will be caught and killed, and you will be put right back on that treadmill
they designed for you, just like they did the last time you tried to make your way out.
- This video isn’t about any of those things. It’s about literal walking animations.
How important they are to get right, and how easy they are to get wrong.
The walk is often the FIRST animation a developer will create for a game.
It tells us about the characters, about the world, and it’s how we learn a lot of gameplay info.
Despite all that, it can be really hard to tell just why some walks look…
(baffled mouth sounds)
off. But by the end of this video, you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly where bad animations
get off course. Like this one which, for purposes of irony, I have pulled from Enter the Matrix.
Like most animals who locomote, humans are very efficient at walking
and tend to move in a pretty regular, cyclical fashion. That’s great for animation,
especially in games, because it means you can draw a few frames and then play 'em over and over,
and we all sorta know that that symbolizes walking. But we’re also very tuned into what a walk looks like. So
animators have to get that cycle just right, or we’ll intuit immediately that it’s artificial.
Early American animators codified the walking process pretty quickly.
The lowest point is the moment you’ve transferred your weight to one foot.
Then you shoot up as you extend that leg, swinging the back leg forward to repeat the cycle.
Arms swing counter to the leg to maintain balance. It’s worth noting that this diagram
reaaaallly only represents the walk of a non-disabled person. Somebody using a
mobility aid will also follow a pretty regular motion, but it might look different from this.
Although there are some… alternate experiments, most early video games replicate this cycle
pretty well. Each frame had to convey information like speed and directionality.
So animators honed in on the two most visible aspects: the limb swing and the head bob.
A lot of walks from this era actually only have two or three frames. They
don’t alternate the sides the legs are swinging on. Our innate knowledge
of walking means we naturally fill in the gaps to make it seem like they are.
Mario’s walk has the same frames as his run, but the loop is sped up so the arms look like
they’re really pumping. His overalls aren’t just a statement on his respectable plumbing profession,
but also really important for readability; They make his arms a different color than
his body - no pixels wasted on outlining them, they just pop.
And then you have Prince of Persia. It’s probably the earliest game to use rotoscoping. The result
has an almost uncanny fluidity, despite not having significantly more keyframes.
This cycle is really only the basics – a process of making a smudge of color look like a walk.
To make it look appealing, you need details. By the early 90s, game consoles were advanced
enough to handle some finesse. Like Link’s little hat bob or the fluttering tanuki tail in SMB3.
If you look closely, Sonic’s ears do an extremely cute little wiggle. These small,
almost unnoticeable elements give a sense of liveliness, bounciness, movement. They’re stylish!
And then 3D animation came along and fucked all this up!
Suddenly you couldn’t just use a few strong keyframes or delightful
flourishes to convey movement. The old head bob and an arm swing just weren’t cuttin' it.
The most common missteps of early 3D walks are over-animating,
under-animating, and bad speed syncing.
Over-animated walks look unexpectedly jaunty. Their elbows stick out – probably
to avoid clipping through their bodies and to make easy-to-read keyframes.
A slightly too wide stance means an exaggerated motion from side-to-side,
means the Prince of Persia looks like he’s a dandy strolling down a garden promenade.
On the flip side, walking cycles can look really, really stiff when they’re under-animated,
and lack fine details like… butt… movement. Harry is holding all of his tension in those glutes.
But the speed issue is the one you’re most likely to notice. Unlike humans, these characters
aren’t actually relying on the motion of the walk to carry them forward. There’s the speed
the animation LOOKS like it’s walking at, and then there’s the speed the overall model is programmed
to move at. They are entirely separate. And it’s easy for them to appear out of sync.
Pixel games can get away with dragging sprites for one or two keyframes and it
still looks pretty okay. But 3D games don’t have that luxury. If the model is too fast,
you get foot sliding or foot skating. If it’s too slow, you get a treadmill.
And turning? Ah! Don’t even get me STARTED on turning.
Jill: Barry!
...
Barry: Jill!
3D graphics did bring a lot of gameplay benefits, like walking states. Suddenly you can
crouch-stealth, strafe around enemies, walk with equipment in your hand! And just like with running,
having unique cycles for each is important for communicating gameplay information.
But more than anything, improved processing power meant more flavorful walking styles.
The true aim of old school animators wasn’t just to make a walk that looked good;
it was to make a walk that defined a character.
Lara’s walk in Tomb Raider is powerful; you can tell in an instant that she’s action-ready.
Jade’s base walk is actually a little jog – she’s a roving photographer, she’s got places to be!
Hitman from Hitman has a very short stride – he is unhurried, in control, focused.
Mario and Link both have what I’ve come to think of as ‘tendie arms; they stick
straight out from their bodies in a way that gives them a kind-of childlike energy.
Just look at Mario’s arms pump! He looks like he thinks he’ll just take
off into the sky if he runs fast enough! I think this is very endearing.
By the mid-2000s, walking cycles were making big steps thanks to
motion capture technology. Fighting games were experimenting with mocap as early as the mid-90s,
and soon other triple-A studios began investing in it too. And I — I do mean invest! It takes a lot
of space, equipment, and specialized talent to mocap, which is why it remains the domain of
AAA studios.
But motion capture wasn’t a silver bullet. Enter the Matrix was extensively mocapped,
but if I slow down this footage, you can see that this run cycle doesn’t have a head bob. The
animation seems to have a middle axis that it’s wiggling around, like a pendulum? Modern mocap
animators will sometimes mirror specific limbs, to make cycles exactly regular on both sides.
My guess is that the devs did the same thing here – only with one half of the body, instead of one
limb. And without additional adjustments, you get this marionette wiggle instead of a clean bob.
But overall, mocapping has really crisped up our walks. And it’s for the same reason
that Prince of Persia’s rotoscoping still looks better than Prince of Persia 3D.
If you’re recording a real human person walking, that walk… looks like a real human person did it.
With motion capture, the arm swings and head bobs are all baked in at the bottom level;
it gets the basics down quickly.
Billy Harper: A lot of it comes down to cadence and nuance
and what I consider — I normally call the fast 75, which is getting 75% of that for free.
Jenna: As the Animation Director for Sucker Punch,
Billy Harper has supervised a lot of mocapping – and even done a little himself.
Billy Harper: And we just have a bunch of footage of me like running over and over again, towards
a big beanbag, and somebody with a punching bag just like hitting me, and like knocking me down.
Like, I am the the punching bag, the Sucker Punch punching bag.
Jenna: For an amateur, a mocapped walk is just the same as that diagram – it’s the basics.
The real power of mocap lies with the skills of professional actors like Daisuke Tsuji,
who played Jin in Ghost of Tsushima.
Billy Harper: …we piggyback off of the the raw
talent that the performance actor brings to the role because they put a lot into the prep,
they do a lot to just really even be able to transform themselves
into this other character, that we want to, we want to pay homage to that.
-On top of their elite skill of walking like how a people walk,
actors imbue their performances with subtle character choices. Mocapping a walk means
actors and animators can focus on what really matters: telling us something about the character.
Billy Harper: If you were to run into him in an alleyway, if you were to see him walking
down an alleyway, you know, strip away the armor, whatever. And you would see him you would say,
Okay, there's someone that knows how to take care of themselves.
But is approachable.
Jenna: Link’s running stride is so long he’s gettin' air time. His arms swing wildly,
little sweat droplets fly off his head. This is the run of an anxious kid who’s doing his best but
is very worried. Compare that to Hitman’s sprint: very little wasted movement, always in control.
Bayonetta walks like the whole world is her runway, an incredible and powerful stomp. 2B’s
full-run animation is pushing at the boundaries of what looks possible for a human. Which is
great because, hey, she’s not human. She has a robotic precision and speed that can’t be matched.
And that’s where an animator turns a great walk
into a great walking animation. Even the best performance isn’t a frame-perfect loop. The
data needs to be massaged a lot to get a cycle that’s regular… but not too regular.
Back in MY DAY, if you got three frames for your walking animation, you were grateful for it!
Even in early 3D games, a cycle was usually one left step, one right step, repeat. But
the regularity of a short loop can really stick out if you watch them for long enough.
Which you’re gonna...because it’s a walking animation.
The more steps you add, the more natural it looks, because the less it loops. But that
creates a lot more work for the animators; almost every other action has to work when it’s performed
off a walk – every item interaction, dodge, attack. So even if one step is only slightly
off from the next, you have to account for that when you blend with any other animation.
Turns are a great place to see animation blending in action.
Most characters no longer spin in space like they’re about to helicopter out of the stage.
Or if they do, it moves so quickly into a side-step, you barely feel it.
Instead, the idle state animation blends into a walking cycle in most directions.
Some walks include stages where you’re just building up speed or skidding to a stop. Others,
a step that puts you back into the idle stance. Some characters even lean into
curves while they’re running. These details are so small they’re hard to notice and appreciate,
but they go a long way to making every moment feel more real.
Death Stranding has a staggering variety of walks, pun intended. You scramble up slopes.
When going downhill, your walk becomes really short, since you’ve got a lot of mass and ya need
to keep it under control. When you have too much shit on your back, you feel it with every labored step.
Of course, there are some issues mocapping can’t solve.
Over-animating still happens, resulting in walks that are…
maybe… too flavorful… for an animation we’re gonna have to look at for hours. Some walks
tell us more about the animator’s desires and expectations than they do about the character.
Also, mocapping does absolutely nothing to solve foot sliding and treadmilling!
These issues happen at the point where the animation is applied to the character frame.
It doesn’t matter how great your animation looks, it can still get out of sync.
Billy Harper: We combat it with what we call internally at Sucker Punch, we call foot locking.
Over certain frames, and we actually have it in the rig, where they can go through
and they can set it and keyframe it, the like… this foot’s supposed to be down
for this range, this foot supposed to be down for this range
Jenna: As the name suggests, the foot part of the skeleton remains
locked to the ground for certain frames of the animation, so the speed of the character
just doesn’t matter as much. And setting up those locking keyframes has other benefits, too.
Billy Harper: We then also figured out a way to use that same sort of like markup
to inform things like splashes or like sound effects within that window of time.
Jenna: These flourishes make a walk feel like it’s really connecting to the ground,
like each step is a unique stamp on the world.
In the sadly short-lived MOBA Paragon, the animators used an Unreal Engine system called
speed warping that dynamically lengthened a character’s stride as the animation sped up.
So when a character’s speed increased, like with a temporary power up,
the animation itself would change. This is really important for avoiding that
Benny Hill walk look you get from just speeding up the animation.
If you WANT to avoid the Benny Hill walk. Funny walks are a staple of comedy because
they not only tell us about the characters doing them, they also say a lot about the world
those characters inhabit.
The Joker’s walk in the challenge mode of Arkham Asylum is extremely incongruous with the rest of
the world, which fits exactly for his whole deal. To him, this is a normal walk. Rogue
Legacy’s high-kicking, arm-out prance shows an eagerness for adventure that borders on oblivious.
And then there’s the Falconer’s walk in Dark Souls 2. I have nothing to say about this,
I just wanted to make you watch it.
Of course indie games consistently prove that a great walk isn’t just
about big mocap budgets. Flavor, style, detail, and strong character designs
are just as important for games that aren’t striving for perfectly realistic animations.
Billy Harper: Like, Jin Sakai’s walk required Daisuke Tsuji putting
his essence into it. A team of animators picking up on that and understanding that,
but then also being able to push it in directions that were unexpected. It takes the VFX team
going through and creating these little mud prints that would would actually literally imprint in the
ground every time he’d step. Takes the sound team to – all these different teams involved
in just making a walk cycle happen. I think that's at least for me, that's the magic of making games.
Jenna: In video games, even the smallest details, the kind that might go entirely unnoticed,
still take a huge amount of effort. And that’s
why it’s always worthwhile to slow your roll and enjoy the stroll.
(jazzy, upbeat and markedly SILLY MUSIC!)
(real Benny Hill hours here)
(WOAH! Is that a passionate sax???)
(YOWWWWWWWW)