Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation

In this 2014 GDC session, indie developer David Rosen explains how to use simple procedural techniques to achieve interactive and fluid animations using very few key frames, with examples from indie games like Overgrowth, Receiver and Black Shades.

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[Zeawsomee]

The clearest example of working smarter instead of harder

[StormySeb]

The fact that I managed to understanding even 50% of this is a testament to how good he was at explaining everything.

[JoshuaReyes]

This is a awesome talk, this guy needs to teach a course on this.

[jonathanxdoe]

Incredible how solid it looks compared to a game like assassin's creed with hundreds of animations. The power of code

[michaelabildgaard]

Ubisoft - Spend 11 years, deitic amounts of money and international divisions developing a billion-dollar franchise around character movement
David Rosen - "Look what I can do with 13 keyframes"

I am in awe every time I come back to watch this

[maya_gameworks]

Jesus what an INSANE talk! U can literally feel ur brain growing.

[animatrix]

I really love that basically every single time ragdoll footage plays people laugh. It's kind of adorable

[ClokworkGremlin]

17:24 most realistic "I've fallen, help!" ragdoll physics I've ever seen, and they're from a tech demo from 4-5 years ago.

[tahaelaradi]

Dear David, this talk has been by far one of the best GDC talks I've watched for years. Technical yet easy to understand, and your approach is just great. I wish you would have explained a little 'how' whenever you explained 'what' you did to accomplish such interesting results. Wishing you lots of success.

[Olina-LiveD]

FYI. After I finished reading 476 comments (=~ 95%), I figured out the speaker did this technique with his own engine. Some people who left the comments with the experimental of Unity, but not implement the entire animation set yet. One commenter executed it with webGL, he also showed the idea on his channel. I am an animator, not a coder, so... I am not sure I can understand. One commenter posted a github link, which seemed the implement code or result, but it's a fail link... For further research, I arranged some google key words from 476 comments:
DamagedSplinter: skeletal animation [insert your preferred graphics api] tutorial
SketchpunkLabs: implimented the idea with webGL

[Donotargue]

This is amazing. Didn’t know you could get such detailed movement/animations with so little keyframes.

[BigFreakingCacodemon]

Well heck, two frames. Even I can do that. I don't need it to be super pretty, but animation felt like it would be a colossal barrier to game development, but this really breaks it down into a much easier, more understandable process. Really cool.

[CubsYT]

My favorite GDC talk. will never stop rewatching this

[speakingmia]

It’s a video back to 2014 and it still looks unbelievable in 2019.

[Twisted_Logic]

I remember when he put this talk up on his own channel a couple years ago and it's still brilliant.

And congratulations to Wolfire on finally bringing Overgrowth into full release!

[zaeche]

Really enjoyed this talk! I know he keeps saying key-frames, but essentially what David's doing is making strong poses, key-framing them sparsely, then using to make them sit nice, right?

To me, It makes for reactive controls with pleasantly whippy animations, and what's clever about it is that the previous animation state ends up being the anticipation for the next animation state and so on. Good stuff.

[DoomRater]

Four minutes in and I can't look away. It's so beautiful. Every developer needs to see this.

[randomrandom]

Really cool and interesting. I used to work in AAA companies for about 12 years, as a gameplay programmer and animation programmer. The procedural animations I was making was always to make something precises, like foot IK, spine tracking, head tracking, ropes and tentacles. But 2 years ago, I made the leap to indie, we are very few and everybody lacks time, so I started to use procedural animation to save animators time. Not because our animators are lazy, but we have multiple characters, so making something a blend of like 8 animations, instead of being procedural, might mean that we just wont do it, since it means 8 animations times the number of characters, while procedural animation can be applied "automatically" to all characters.

It might be just a bias because I know about it, but like the speaker said, it is not that hard, it's just a bit of math and I feel the best way to learn anything, including math, is doing something cool with it. I first though it was scary, now I love making procedural animation.

[LeeAndersonMusic]

Man, I remember playing a very early version of Overgrowth many years ago, and especially then it blew my mind. Even with how simple it was I loved how alive the characters felt. Now over a decade later I find this video to explain why. I didn't know Receiver, another favourite, was made by the same developer. Great video

[brianshannahan]

I know I'm a year late to this, but... damn. This is literally some of the most impressive animation I've ever seen, and all explained in a straightforward, usable way. Awesome work.