Steve, what kind of animation work do animals and plants get?
TL;DRAnimals get proper animation sets driven by design, while trees and grass aren't skeletally animated but use vertex animation, with wind-driven detail bending and touch bending when walked through.
Animals and plants. It depends. I think it's kind of a difficult question to answer. Can you clarify that a bit more? The animals, for instance, any animals that we have in the game will have a proper animation set for them. So typically for us, design drives a lot of what it is that the creature can do. So that way you don't have a space deer doing jiu-jitsu.
I can mention the tree stuff, like how we actually get away with not animating trees, because of course trees don't need to mantle and take cover and do locomotion. But trees do need to rustle in the wind. They need to bend with the wind. So back at Crytek, this was a huge thing, right? I mean, we had palm trees, we had huge, huge forest trees, and they all needed to rustle in the wind. The palm trees actually needed to bend and move around. So we have a lot of the same technology that was being used for that. It had to be re-implemented in kind of a new way for the planets, and because of the sheer amount of them. But we developed some tools to help the artists mark up the trees; in such a way, we actually use vertex colors. Every single channel does something a little bit different. It's interesting that we keep talking about this, because someone calling used vertex colors and all these other things. I'm trying to remember what exactly each of the channels does, but one of them is like the intensity, one of them is the frequency, and the other one is like a masking, so basically where it goes. Now, the guys have developed some tools so that the artists can actually mark this up a lot easier, so that they're not just grabbing individual verts and saying, okay, this one needs to move this much, this one needs to move this much. And we did develop a pretty good process back at Crytek to make sure that, again, the trees could bend in the wind. They could rustle in the wind. And even better is when you walk through things like grass and that kind of thing, they bend away. We had touch bending and detail bending is what we call it. So detail bending is the sort of stuff that happens with the wind. And then the touch bending is something that you walk through, grass and things like that.
It's very visual effects or physics oriented, depending upon how it works. It is animation in the sense that it moves, but it's not skeletal character animation or something like that.
But it's vertex animation.