Surprise: Characters Look More Realistic When Given Muscles
Character movement is one of those things that can make or break a game's realism, even moreso than character design. Good movement will get you through times of bad design more often than good design will get you through bad movement.
I hearken to Grand Theft Auto as an example: despite the oven mitt hands, low-poly bodies and nearly expressionless faces, the combination of well-animated (or captured, I'm not sure) movement and exquisite voice acting makes those characters come alive.
So I was not surprised (but still horrified) to learn that the traditional method of character model construction was from the outside in, that is to say, drawing the outlines first and not worrying much about skeletal or muscular structures. Any freshman figure drawing student can tell you what a massive mistake this is, how truncated and stiff your creations will be if you jump right into the outline before knowing how the skeleton works.
But this is apparently a revelation in game animation.
A more accurate method, Zhang says, is to build a character's muscles first and then add the skin on top of them. It's more natural looking, he says, but it requires detailed knowledge of anatomy, and it's counterintuitive for an artist who has the external appearance of a character in mind. For those reasons, he says, the muscle-based approach has been mostly an academic curiosity.
"Counterintuitive" my ass. How is it counterintuitive to think of a body being moved by its muscles, or supported by its skeleton? If this is truly the mindset of the current generation of game artists, then no wonder the vast majority of titles have such appallingly canned movement.
Let this be a lesson to aspiring game designers, cartoonists, and artists of all stripes: learn to draw. More specifically, learn to draw traditionally, from the anatomy out, like the old mastas used to do it back in the day.
Remember, life drawing class = staring at naked people for a long, long time. And many of them, I can tell you from personal Art School ™ experience, are middling-to-extremely attractive.
Beefing Up Animation Software [Technology Review, thanks Jason]
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