Animation 2.0.(computer animation will become the predominant quality determinant of next-generation video games )

The visual quality of video games has improved dramatically with the arrival of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and, soon, Sony's PlayStation 3. In fact, some games--in particular, racing titles--approach the much-promised goal of photorealism. However, amongst all the talk about HD, new shader models, and lighting, many consumers have come to realize: The animations still look distinctly last gen.

The high state of rendering fidelity exposes low-animation quality much more than on previous consoles. Characters look great in screenshots, but they can seem unnatural, clunky, and even robotic when in motion.

And a second problem has surfaced, as well: After playing any game for a little while, users will notice that the animations always look the same. This didn't matter so much when simple rendering signaled that we were merely playing a computer game. However, when a photorealistic Kobe Bryant repeats a move for the hundredth time with digital precision, something seems very wrong.

The reason for these two problems is that our game animation pipelines have not changed very much since the 16-bit days. Animators create keyframe animation or processed motion-captured clips, and the data is played back at, more or less, appropriate times in the game. There are two issues with this approach. First, animators have little creative control over the last section of the pipeline (that is, what their animations look like in-game). Second, played-back data can never be truly interactive.

Animation Solutions

The manifestation of the first problem usually results when animators walk over to the game's animation programmer and complain that their carefully crafted animations look totally wrong in-game. The way to solve this, and to get in-game animation to the quality that the raw material already supports, is to provide animators with intuitive tools to perform the tasks currently carried out by animation programmers. Those include the determination of the transitions between animations, the nature and timing of blends, the distribution and weighting of different animations across the character's body, and even the responsiveness of the animation to user or AI input. All of these are creative tasks and, therefore, should be under the full control of the animator, and this should result in very quick turnaround times.

The solution to the second problem (that is, non-interactivity and repetitiveness) lies in the CPU power available on ...