How To Animate a Character You've Never Seen Before

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Spore has a unique problem: most of the content in the game will be made after the game ships. This includes the animated creatures, which can have almost arbitrary shapes and skeleton topology...my creature might have two arms and one leg, yours might have no arms and seven legs, and two mouths. How can we animate these creatures when we haven't seen them before, and hopefully animate them well enough to convey emotions? How to we let animators use their skills "today" in a way we can apply "later" to the user's creature? This lecture will discuss the various approaches we used to procedurally animate user-created creatures in Spore, and what worked and what didn't, along with some suggestions about how some of the techniques might benefit other more traditional games.

This page was last edited on 10 May 2008, at 05:20.