Will all the current animation work being done (IK, etc.) apply to the female model as well, or will she require a significant or minimal amount of additional work?
TL;DRThe animation team's goal is to retarget new male animations to the female so she is functional in game, then gradually replace them with female-specific ones, though time means not everything will get a unique version.
That's a good question. I think the goal is you want a male and female character that feel unique. I've seen a lot of games in the past where they don't have the footprint that we have, right? So the female shares the male skeleton, they share all the male animations, they do little tricks like offsetting the female with additives so she's not flat-footed, but she's up on heels. But it never feels 100% natural. It always feels awkward and weird. And they look like guys walking around, really. Because unfortunately, half the time you're not working on a Tomb Raider game where the lead is a female character. You're working on a heavily populated male game where the guys are walking everywhere. I've worked on a ton of games in the past where we really want to get a female in and we just run out of time. There's not enough space. We've blown our footprint for data. But yes, so our goal from now on, since we now have a female that works in game, is anything we do on a guy, if we want to do a certain animation or animation set on a male, we then quickly retarget to the female, which makes her functional in game. So now she's doing everything that the male can do. Sometimes it's kind of ugly animation, because if they batch the retarget... It's never good to do something that extreme and just let it auto-batch. You really want to go in there by hand and make it look good. But our goal is not necessarily just to batch everything so she's playing guy animations on a female skeleton. We're going to go in later and replace those animations with animations specifically shot for a female. Biggest problem is just time. I mean, it takes time. You see how long it takes for us to get all these male animations in-game. Multiply that by two if we want to do female. I don't think everything is going to be a unique female version. I think there are going to be certain animations that we're not going to be able to, for whatever reason, shoot. So she'll have a male version of it, maybe a modified male version, so she feels a little more feminine walking around or doing whatever that task is. But for something like dancing, we have females dancing. One of our actresses here did some really, really good female dances. I really want to get those in. Well, right now, the female plays male dances, the frat boy dances. So as soon as we get an opportunity, when we get some free time to go in and update the female with female animations, we're totally going to do that. For example, all these work zone animations I told you about, we shot them for the male and for the female. We've done all the male. We've retargeted it to the female. Female's functional. As soon as we get an opportunity, we're going to go grab what we shot for the female and start replacing the animation that's already there.