Animating Vessel

Hey there! It’s been a while. Since last time a lot of things have changed on Vessel, but I’m saving that for another day. Today I want to talk about how we are dealing with animations. 

Vessel is a third person game with a modern controller, that essentially means that we have a lot of animations. That is a pain point for two main reasons: animating is expensive, and it is a slow craft. That’s the main reason why I think this post is interesting. How are we, a small team with no budget and in a rush, dealing with a situation that is a potential project killer? 

Essentially we have two main animation sources, assets that we bought for less important actions, and motion capture. While motion capture suits aren’t cheap, they make the animation workflow faster and cheaper. In our case the price of the suits wasn’t an issue since we have a couple of friends that were willing to help us.

Let’s put some numbers on all the above explanations to have the full context. For Vessel we need around 250 animations that we can’t buy since they are hero level assets (if you are not from the industry those are top quality assets) and let’s say that those animations take on average 3 days to be done in a shippable quality (since I’m mixing in there cycles  like walking and really small actions like shooting, and the models are retro looking I think it’s a good number for this example) we are talking about 750 days worth of work for the animation team. 

Let’s say that we want to ship in a year or a year and a half, the only way to do this with guarantee is to have at least 4 animators (keep in mind that a year has around 243 working days and people get sick!). Since the assets are important (otherwise we will be buying them) we want someone with experience to do them. On average, in Europe that means salaries around 60K Eur, which translates to 240k Eur for the animation budget if we want to animate everything from scratch. 

Mocap suits aren’t cheap, a full suite (software + suits) can cost around 15k - 20K or can be rented around 1K per day. But in our first session (4 hours) we recorded roughly 110 animations that will only need cleaning and polish. So let’s do the numbers again, let’s say that we rent the mocap suit for 2 sessions (2K), and we need on average a day of cleaning and polish for the animation (250 days) which will be translated to an animator and a half to achieve it in a year. In order to simplify the example, I will count the same salary for the animator (even if it can be less experienced here). That’s around 90K Eur in salaries, and let’s not forget about the actor for the 2 days which will be around 250 to 600 per session. That will set up our budget around 93K Eur, which is a significant reduction in costs.

At the moment we don’t have that money. We are mostly working on the good will of a lot of friends that are lending us a hand on a lot of fronts. We will also need to lower the bar on our expectations to make something that is good enough to ship, even if it’s not as polished or in the style that we initially intended.

Anyway the recording session was very fun and productive. Here you can see our actor, Joel. Hopefully we can show some of his work soon. As always I'm reading you in the comments! 

Joel Cabrera, our main actor in a mocap suit, ready to record Lucas