What Happened to Mass Effect Andromeda's Animation? - Extra Frames - General

[hd]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qvvmVpS3AA[/hd] Some insight into why ME:A turned out the way it did.

Great video. Well worth the watch. It does shed a lot of light on the matter. However, a big part of the problem with me is not so much the animations as much as some core characters have been terribly modeled.

Tldw: bad algorithms for procedural animation are responsible, probably maybe idk

What I don't get in his explanation (which was great, btw) is this [video=youtube;WWp720-lLv8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWp720-lLv8[/video] You could blame the automatic system and the way they pretty much worked with it. But what I don't get is: what happened here? surely in the leaked April 2016 gameplay the facial animations looked way better, but after a year the animation was just downgraded like that. The only theory I have for that is that the automatic lip-sync system used in that scene glitched out. But even then the earlier build's automatic system was fine? what the fuck happened here

[QUOTE=SenhorCreeper;52098643]What I don't get in his explanation (which was great, btw) is this You could blame the automatic system and the way they pretty much worked with it. But what I don't get is: what happened here? surely in the leaked April 2016 gameplay the facial animations looked way better, but after a year the animation was just downgraded like that. The only theory I have for that is that the automatic lip-sync system used in that scene glitched out. But even then the earlier build's automatic system was fine? what the fuck happened here[/QUOTE] A side effect of the build targeting consoles. Assets have to be compressed, resulting in stiffer, shakier animations, blurry textures; the lower target for performance means that graphic fidelity has to be reduced to reach it, and it's likely that volumetric smoke was causing problems with keeping a steady framerate so it got cut altogether, as well as some of the other shaders that make the scene more dramatic. The changes to the lighting, post process and textures are all deliberate though.

Source has the vcd system.

One thing I wish the video had touched on was the fact that the main Bioware studio was not responsible for this, it was their support studio which helped out with the previous mass effect titles such as cinematic and DLC creation.

I keep forgetting how insanely well animated the most recent Uncharted is tbh it's got some slick animations

[QUOTE=shad0w440;52100523]Source has the vcd system.[/QUOTE] God, even if Faceposer was an awful program, it's automatic lipsyncing was still solid in combination with properly set up VACs (you can probably thank Bay Raitt for that one) and the different kinds of actions the characters can do (like looking at the player, looking at other NPCs or even dev-placed entities, layering different sub animations on top to give them more unique animations even though almost every animation you see are canned.) Such a great fucking system, and it integrated really well with Hammer (for the time anyways.) Disappointing that nobody has really copied it properly, or at least a system like facefx where it's available to multiple systems and licensed out. also it's rediculous to place the blame entirely on the system or """bugs.""" it's clear that it's scheduling and a lack of skill because the team hadn't made anything else significant prior.

[QUOTE=SenhorCreeper;52098643]What I don't get in his explanation (which was great, btw) is this You could blame the automatic system and the way they pretty much worked with it. But what I don't get is: what happened here? surely in the leaked April 2016 gameplay the facial animations looked way better, but after a year the animation was just downgraded like that. The only theory I have for that is that the automatic lip-sync system used in that scene glitched out. But even then the earlier build's automatic system was fine? what the fuck happened here[/QUOTE] If I had to take a guess, that was an internal scene meant to be shown to the higher ups as a high level concept to what they want to achieve. It may have been fully hand animated, or used what ever system they use to the highest degree. A degree in which the rest of the game didn't achieve.

Is extra credits back to being good again? I remember about two years ago people here making fun of their methodology and research.

My main question about the animations wasn't "How did this happen" but more "How did this get released in this state"

[QUOTE=IntenseBarney;52103974]My main question about the animations wasn't "How did this happen" but more "How did this get released in this state"[/QUOTE] did a lot of people still buy andromeda?

Relying on autogenerated scenes is what my gut told me while playing. But with the evidence from the leaked footage, I just don't know. Maybe they had a massive data loss or the scene data was corrupted and they didn't have time to do anything but re-generate everything? I don't know, but with how little actual gameplay footage they showed in the last couple of years, something about the development was always extremely fishy.

Sort of a disappointing video. What he actually had to say without repeating would've fit into 10 minutes, and bottom line is that he has no idea what actually went wrong with the animations.

Im not sure what the creators were thinking of. Like for real, releasing such bull***p to the public, that looks like never ever had beta tested. Or do they like dirty fame or some sort of it. Like "This is the company that makes shitty games" or whatever.