ArenaNet Developer Animation Team Interview

Over on our main network site IncGamers.com you can find an interview with ArenaNet and the team behind the game's art/animation. The interview features comments from ArenaNet's Heron Prior, Scott Mayhew, Christian Venturini, and Rebecca Coffman and it's well worth a read. Here's a snip:

First, could you tell us about the animation team, how is it organised?



RC: We are currently a team of six animators. ArenaNet has very little middle management, so everyone needs to be self-managing.

Each animator is responsible for their assignment, which involves more than animation. It�s very important for each of us to communicate directly with designers, programmers, and other art departments.

|||Mo Cap equipments are expensive. Well, the cheapest ones are 5k USD and the better ones cost 30k USD for a whole set.

I guess it's the price of 2 new cars. Shouldn't be that much trouble to buy one. And I always thought there should be places that you can rent Mo Cap equipments. If not, NCsoft themselves can get a central Mo Cap studio setup so that all the subsidiary companies can share it.|||meh it'd be a waste of money for GW, since it would only be useful for humaniod creatures at best, and then only certain animations.|||Mo cap is overrated. A very expensive way of animating, and only suitable if you really have to do complicated cinematics. (like in the game Fahrenheit)

Besides, even after acquiring the mo cap data you still have to do a lot of work. So it's not exactly faster either. Better to stick with traditional animation. It seems anet has some very talented animators.|||yea doing animation the old way is alot work. I never did any animation for games. So you key the frame everything and the programs do all the work cool.

I think that anet should in vest in just animator. If they can aford it it may free up time and work as well push qaulity. You never know too anet may end with a big team to make gw cartoons.|||Quote:




RC: You’re right – it’s usually too difficult to get a character to sit on a chair. But it is possible, in a limited way. For example, if we make a special character skeleton that includes joints for a chair. This was actually done for a cinematic in Guild Wars Factions.




I cannot recall which character would this be? Emperor perhaps?|||Quote:








yea doing animation the old way is alot work. I never did any animation for games. So you key the frame everything and the programs do all the work cool.

I think that anet should in vest in just animator. If they can aford it it may free up time and work as well push qaulity. You never know too anet may end with a big team to make gw cartoons.




Well if we're lucky we'll see even better cut scenes in GW2 than we did in GW1. It's as close as we'll probably get to GW Cartoons. I hope they also make the game more machinema friendly. I think a lot of players would enjoy making their own little GW2 stories. I tell ya, making the Miya and Malafide movies was a very tiresome job. The emote options and camera control in GW1 are very limited. I dearly hope they make it easier in GW2.

As for game animation, yes it is a lot of work. I see the hard work of animators every day, and they can take up to 8 hours to finish just 2 animations for a character. It's that much work. But anet already has a big and very talented animation team. It's in good hands.|||Quote:








I cannot recall which character would this be? Emperor perhaps?




Shiro's Meditation of the Reaper/Sunjiang District cinematic I think. Or maybe the Fortuneteller, she's sitting down mostly.