Animation feedback

[Whaddageek]

I love the aesthetic, but you've missed a real easy thing to do with your animations to complete the look and make your game pop; Stutter the animations. It shouldn't be super-smooth perfect 60fps character movement, they should be 24-frame and slightly jerky to properly imitate stop-motion animation.

(I don't have Unity open in front of me, but I believe you can actually do so fairly easy by adjusting the animation curves in the animation itself.)

[SlowBros]

Originally posted by Whaddageek:

I love the aesthetic, but you've missed a real easy thing to do with your animations to complete the look and make your game pop; Stutter the animations. It shouldn't be super-smooth perfect 60fps character movement, they should be 24-frame and slightly jerky to properly imitate stop-motion animation.

(I don't have Unity open in front of me, but I believe you can actually do so fairly easy by adjusting the animation curves in the animation itself.)

We actually experimented with reducing the fps for the character movements to get more of the stop-motion feel to it. However, since camera movements still need to be very fluid, we felt the effect was more distracting than pleasing since it looked more like "low fps" (low in bad way...)

If you look at the new Death Stranding 2 Trailer you can see a similar effect on that puppet. While this works for a single element, imagine all character with this movement.

Sable (great game, please check it out) did something similar with the character movements, but also there we felt it doesn't feel fully right.

[Whaddageek]

Makes sense! Just as a thought (Unless this has already been experimented with to death of course!), perhaps you could try to just stutter the animations just a little to make it more "imperfect" rather than shoot for an 'accurate' stop-motion look, if that makes sense? Still moving relatively smooth, but looking a smidge jerky transitioning between keyframes. It's the smooth perfection of the movements where it "breaks" the effect and it might be feasible to hit a median between the two.

Still though, that's just my two cents from what I've seen of it and I think it's a very interesting project as a whole!

[Torus]

Please no. I find the animation to stuttery already

[JeppeBrungus]

I am a fan of the more stuttery Wallace and Gromit/classic Pingu style, but I think the smooth one fits here and has its own charm. Maybe someone can mod or the devs can offer choppier style as an option down the line.

[SixelAlexiS]

Originally posted by Torus:

Please no. I find the animation to stuttery already

PSA: the animations are tied to the framerate, to have smooth animation you have to lock the framarate at 30FPS or multiple of that (60, 90, 120FPS and so on).
Give it a try and you will see the difference.

[Althar]

I was also hoping for stuttery / stop-motion animations. Visually the game is stunning and the facial animations are great but the buttery smooth / puppet-like motion is slightly at odds IMO.

Perhaps as an option?

[ND]

If you were going to do this first you should make it optional like the Spider-verse mode in Spider-man Miles Morales and you would have to do it in a way that the global movement of the characters is still fully smooth max fps to avoid strobing or stuttering, and ONLY the animation poses are locked to say a 12 fps rate to get that stop motion look. https://www.polygon.com/2020/10/30/21541814/marvel-spider-man-miles-morales-into-the-spider-verse-suit-pre-order-early-access

Re: animation feedback, something I would like to see is a clearer reaction (ie pose change) when switching to running mode. Also when you use the run button when standing still... like maybe duck down into a "ready to run" anticipating pose. It's fine to have some inertia for running/jogging and getting up to speed, but right now the animation change is subtle enough initially that it wasn't immediately clear to me that you can even run from just trying different buttons.