What is the most complicated animation you have ever implemented into the game?

Most complicated animation? I have to think about that one. Everything has its own complexities, right? And there's different ways of solving these problems. I'd say probably the most complex ones have to deal with the ships. The way the ships animate, they're super challenging, just super challenging because they're still building the ship half the time. You're getting the ship to animate it and then they're changing things and renaming things and pivots are getting moved and it destroys your animation. So that's really challenging, just getting the ship animated and then getting the character animated on top of that, because characters got to get in the ship, right? And I remember back when I did the Hornet, I believe Hannes did the first Hornet enter maybe? I can't remember if it was him or if it was somebody from CGBot. I went in after I started and touched up on the animation to make it a little bit nicer. And one of the things I did when you hopped in the Hornet was grab ahold of the yoke, which meant when you grab ahold of it, it's animating with the character and you got all this movement in it and everything like that. And it's like, hey, it's great until they decide to change something. It just completely destroys the animations, and things don't line up. And you're like, why is this not lining up?

So it's like a whole other layer there, because you don't just have to worry about the character, but then the ship's animating, and that's where metrics come into play, right? That helps a lot.

Totally. Metrics come into play. One of the challenges that we have right now with our metrics, and again, things that are going to be challenging: one of our animators is doing all the sitting consoles. In order to get the character to sit in the sitting console and look natural, you actually have to pull the chair. Just like if you were to sit at your desk, you don't just sit down at your desk and you're out like this, I'm working at my desk like this. You sit down and you got to scoot up to your desk so then you work comfortably and naturally. Same with getting out of it. So what we need to do is we need to sit that character in the chair and we need to slide that chair forward in order to have the character feel like they're naturally sitting in this workstation. We call them sitting consoles, but just computers. Like you go on the bridge of the Idris and you see all these AI navigating to these seats and sitting down and working these computers. So how do we do that? We got to sit them down. We got to animate the prop to move forward at the same timing. We also don't want to create like 500 chair animations of them sliding forward. So we can't have a unique animation for each sit-down animation. What I had Vanessa do, she's the one working on this, what I had her do is I had her take what's the average time of the character to sit on the chair. That's when the chair starts to move forward. Make every character fit that template. It's basically an animation metric. So hopefully we only have to animate the chair twice, enter and exit.

It saves a lot of time. A lot of time. Memory. It saves a little bit of memory, but it saves memory as well. The more we can reuse an animation, the better.