How to gradually establish a global thinking, master and optimize the entire set of work processes, increase the initiative of their own positions; how to split the work points and polish the quality of the project.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Game Grapes” (ID: youxiputao ), the author of Thomas’s skull.
Dou Debin works in the Tencent Inter-Entertainment Aurora Light Studio group and is the person in charge of the action development of “Tianya Mingyue Knife”. He said that when he was working in his early years, he often got an idea and he got the reply of planning and procedures:
After thinking and thinking, Dou Debin finally realized the meaning behind this sentence:
In order to solve this problem, Dou Debin did not quarrel with planning and procedures, but learned the whole process of animation effects, changed the traditional development method, and allowed the art to gain greater autonomy.
In addition, Dou Debin also told an interesting little story: They have made a version of the most basic light work in order to catch up with the version test, and it seems like this.
But after the test, the then producer, now the president of Northern Lights, Ethan, went to his position and said to him: “The performance of “The End of the Moon” cannot be short-boarded.” Turn around and leave.
I remember that it was an afternoon. I was standing at the station on the 3rd floor of Tencent Building, Block C, Xinye Park, No. 1801 Hongmei Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai. I looked at the back of the boss, one A fire in the heart of the youth was ignited. I thought at the time… I also want to be the boss!
Jokes are jokes. Later, Dou Debin led the team to disassemble the core objectives a little bit, and infer the complete concept in the reverse direction. The art planning and program work by the art has realized the effect of today’s “Tianya Mingyue Knife”.
Although your work may not be related to action design, you may learn from Dou Debin’s sharing, how to gradually establish a global thinking, master and optimize the entire workflow, and increase the initiative of your position; how to Split the work points and polish the quality of the project.
The following is the sharing content of Dou Debin, published by the game grape:
Very happy to come to TGDC. I entered Tencent in 2011 and have been working on the development of the “Tianya Mingyue Knife” project. I used to work in two companies in Shanghai, and I also developed RPG. I also have experience in this category.
But as an animator, I have always had a lot of confusion. The development of MMORPG actions is always subject to many restrictions, and it is not possible to fully express the sense of hit and rhythm.
There are so many successful games on the market. When two people are fighting, I can only tell through the special effects and the numbers on the top of the head that I have attacked the other party, or have I been attacked? Why can’t MMOs have strong hard feedback like a single machine?
Every time I think about it, I feel very weak. When I have some ideas and want to discuss with the planning and procedures, I will get such a reply most of the time:
Is the art design in the room, especially the 3D design classmates, feel familiar? These words are almost in every project.I heard it.
I was thinking at the time, what exactly are they talking about? Can’t have displacement, then there is no displacement? If the mechanism does not support it, then let it support it? If it is not easy to achieve, then let it be realized? Are we doing development, doing creation, and doing this is not normal?
After I thought a lot, I gradually understood the meaning of planning and procedures. Most of the time they say three words: you don’t understand.
They think that you are doing art design. You can draw the original painting. Just do the animation well. If you tell me, you don’t understand. I am too lazy to explain so much to you.
What makes the information on both sides so asymmetric? Mainly because the action classmates are not enough to understand the implementation and technology of the action logic, which makes the communication between the two parties not in one channel.
So after coming to the knives, I made up my mind to make a breakthrough. At that time, our game launched a slogan: martial arts change, from the picture performance, character demeanor, combat action, from the entire art level of performance innovation.
How to change the traditional production process?
I think if the animation wants to break through, we must first understand how the action is implemented.
In 2011, I came across an action editing software: Morpheme, which can completely edit the behavior and logic of the entire character, and the art students can learn and master.
It has the advantage that its nodes are in two-dimensional form, and each node function is behind a long list of code, you can directly operate by dragging it to its operation interface. With these, we can easily build the behavior of the character. This is a simple schematic:
Some of the actions of “Tianya Mingyue Knife” is to mix the functions of some action pieces with some functions to complete the effect we want.
Learning Morpheme let me know that animation doesn’t just achieve the effect, but also consider the logic behind it, and then push the painting to do what it wants. So when we were fighting the “Tianya Mingyue Knife”, we thought that the traditional action production method can not meet our requirements for effect verification and rapid iteration. We need to adjust the process.
This is the process of traditional animation. Planning will first tell the animation what needs to be done: is a single attack, AOE or big move? Then the art began to be produced as needed.
Some planning is very experienced, and even tells you: How many frames are I rocking before, where are the hit points, how many frames are cut off, how many frames are shaken afterwards, but what about art? When doing version verification, it is basically planning and matching the effect, and then calling the animation to see if the animation is not correct.
But based on the learning of the previous Morpheme software, we have a clear understanding of the logic of animation. The first thing we do is to turn “understanding needs” into “implementation.”
This means that we will discuss the actual performance of the skills and actions with the program and planning. As a developer, we can finally get on the table.
Now I can say that this effect only needs to do 3 action segments, through a Blend node, according to the maximum and minimum values of the parameters opened to me by the program, I can operate the mouse to fuse it.
After we addTwo processes have been added to modify the configuration logic and configuration effects of the entire skill. After the animation, we will import Morpheme and build the action logic in the software, which is the behavior tree that we just saw. After that, all our resources will be packaged into the version.
We also configure the effects in the version, which is the behavior of the configuration skills. This word sounds very high. In fact, it is nothing more than the effect of enriching the skills of the atomic items such as attacking action, attacking action, attacking special effects, and attacking special effects in the skill editor. These can all be done by art.
Why do I emphasize that movements should be done through art, not planning? Because I think that the inner feelings of art are more sensitive, the effect of their own adjustment will be more accurate and more direct.
At the end of the version verification, we will call the producer, the main beauty, the main policy to see the effect of the skills together. This has changed: I want you to see my effect, not that I am called to see the effect.
The biggest meaning of this process is that art students can really understand how the effect of a version is formed. We can control the entire process, not just a part of the process.
You can look at the early process of determining the knife, what is our working mode: