Game Animation Research

In a future photography lesson we will be looking into how different game's use animation and will soon be going on games to use different animations with our body's on the Xbox Kinect. I am going to research multiple different game's on the Xbox such as Forza Motorsport and Kinect Sports (as shown in the pictures). This will be part of our Animations assignment in which we have done many different sorts of animation, such as Stock Frame, 3D, 2D, Flat image and Green Screen and now were moving on to physical animation with our body's.

Animation in video game's is very complex in regular video games, getting all the sequences in perfect sequence so they flow smoothly is hard enough and has took years to develop, back in the day when there wasn't such equipment to make the flow of the characters movements so smooth game's were much more un-realistic and had jumpy clips like a poor animation film made. To jump to a high level where a game system can incorporate humans movements to control the movement in a video game is a huge jump, it takes a lot of engineering and testing to do this, but through this humans can now animate themselves into a TV screen on a video game.

Above is a video I found of Forza Motorsport during gameplay whilst using the Kinect system to move the car with your hands, by forming a steering wheel shape with your hands you can move the car without using a Steering wheel controller or a standard controller. The game runs smoothly even when human movements are incorporated into the game the animation frame rate is still very small so the game isn't jumpy and all runs smoothly.

We could possibly use different accessories in our animation such as things which can be attached to controls like Baseball bats, Rackets, and other sports accessories.

Another game which incorporates smooth movement in it's gameplay is 'Batman Arkham City', the smooth movement is used in the gliding system in the game, the fighting system and the movement of characters all together in general. This is different compared to the Xbox Kinect movement which is used in some games, the Batman game just use's a standard controller which you can use to control the character. The animation used in the game is at a very complex level and would take months, possibly year/years to create, the frame rate of the game is very low, so the frame of each movement flows very smoothly and the range of different movements you can do is very wide. The simplicity of the game and the fact that humans cant physically move the character with the Kinect shows that the game would of took too much time and it would of been too hard to put that sort of feature into it.

Above I have put a video showing some of the fighting in the Batman game and what it's like, and is a good example of how the animation used for the fighting scenes is very smooth and how its not jumpy, and also shows that the frame rate is very low for it to run so smoothly. By doing this Rocksteady (the creators) have shown that without putting the whole animation system of using your body in the game that the animation still work's very well without it.

In comparison the two different types of animation are very different and both are unique in each way, the animation used in standard games compared to the physical use your body games could been seen as more effective and smooth, where as sometimes on the Kinect animation games it may not pick up some body movements which could possibly make the smoothness of the gameplay go down.

The Super Mario Bro's is a good example to what I was referring to earlier about old game's. Super Mario Bro's was first made in the 1900's when most up to date technology wasn't around, the game has a very slow frame rate, which makes the game very jumpy all the time, to movement of the characters aren't smooth and you can notice the gap between each movement. This sort of animation used in the Mario Bro's game's must of either been captured by drawing out the images and scanning them onto the computer or by using poor technology to try and link all the images together. Either way compared to most games in the 2000's the animation in the Mario game's is far too old and tacky, by tacky I mean because of the lack of smoothness between each movement it make's the animation for the game look jumpy and badly made, but obviously because of more up to date technology this is not a problem anymore.

In the above video, you can see some footage from the old Super Mario Bro's and see how slow and jumpy the animation is, Each movement is at such a high frame rate, one second he could be on the floor and the next in the air, Comparing this to more up to date video game's it is very poor and the animation must of been created with a poor piece of technology. From watching all 3 videos, you can see how good technology is more up to date, and how it slowly de-grades as years go back.