I think the biggest problem of all in the Elder Scrolls entirely is the animations. For both humanoid and beast the animations were choppy, unrealistic, not very believable and just not smooth at all.

What are your thoughts?

no one can argue about that cause its true.


compare lets say assassin creed with oblivion...

Hopefully now that Bethesda hired extra people and was able to be 'picky' with their choices, they decided to get some better animators.

I think most of us, including the developers, can agree on that. The good news is that they seem to be working on it.

From the Skyrim Wikipedia page…

“Executive producer Todd Howard has stated that the studio has invested in new talent to significantly improve the characters and animation over previous Bethesda games.“

yeah they are horriiiiible, but i think the new engine will be able to provide better animations

One word: engine.

i have no worries. infact i think five years from now. we'll all be here in the same place, complaining and nitpicking every little detail of our favorite game of alltime...Skyrim.

agreeeed...just thinking of all the mods that will be built using this new engine...oooooooh yeeeah

Animation

LightSpeed provides a powerful animation system that supports automatic animation playback and character-driven animation sequences with the ability to blend between multiple animations simultaneously. Gamebryo supports animating nearly any parameter that artists can animate in 3ds max and Maya and will export that animation (including materials and particles) to automatically work in the engine. Artists can also set up animation sequences that can be activated and blended to achieve an array of visual results, removing the burden of animation blending from programmers. Animation blending just works and is under full control of the artists and designers. Full unlimited layering of animations is also supported so creating characters with separate upper body animations is a snap! PhysX is also directly supported and viewable in the tool.

The Animation Tool augments the art pipeline by providing you with a feature-rich tool that helps you preview game character animations and configure their dynamic transitions. With the Animation Tool, you can do the following:

* Preview individual animation sequences
* Preview and edit animation sequence transitions
* Interactively drive character animations to mimic game behavior
* Preview animations on different models
* Configure transitions types and timing between animations, allowing animators full control without requiring custom programming


I think your right.

A long while ago someone popped into the speculation thread claiming to have spoken with a motion-capture animation company rep who said they were working for a software developer in Maryland on a big new game. It's been so long ago I couldn't find the thread, but this was basically all the information he gave so it's difficult to arrive at a definite connection between this and Skyrim. However, it would certainly be cool if they used that technology for the game's animation.

Skip Gamebryo entirely. Lightspeed as well. It's all crap compared to new ones.

Other modern game engines are so so much better and more powerful.

Just an example , not saying i want this but

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytx0OEEA5TM

At 2:25 there's a place which looks similar to dragon attacks in a skyrim city. Of course it isn't but it is still nice to pretend!

Yeah that looks pretty awesome. It's dark and fire rain from the sky. Some destructive environment... (buildings are razed in real-time).
Would be really cool if that happened in Skyrim. Very atmospheric.

So you want better things... no shiet

The engine doesn't affect animation

So you've seen Light Speed in action huh? Please tell us what game or games have been released using the 2007/2008 release of the Gamebryo Light Speed engine.

Are they even using Lightspeed? I thought the engine was rooted in gamebryo but built in-house so what does Lightspeed have to do with Skyrim anyway?

indeed

Animations are really not much of an engine issue, I've seen games with engines that are technically inferior have much better animations than Oblivion, and a new engine does not guarentee better animations, we'll only get better animations if Bethesda does a good job on the animations. The new engine might allow Bethesda to create the most realistic looking character models we've ever seen in a game, for all we know, as long as they remain still, but if the animations are clunky and fake looking, they're still going to look awkward when seen in motion.

I would say that animations in the Elder Scrolls need work, yes, and I have no doubt that Bethesda will improve them, the real question is will they improve them enough? I would say that Oblivion's animations are better than Morrowind's, but they're still not good enough. But a new game brings with it new oportunities to improve upon the areas that the last one didn't do well enough, so I do hope that Bethesda will put more effort into making better animations this time around, because I'd say that the quality of character animations can contribute more to determining whether characters feel convincing or not than the realism of the character models.

Here is a youtube video of Red Dead Redemption, It shows animal animation, character animation, and it is in a 'winter/snow' enviroment. I would be very happy if skyrim had this kind of animation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBe_la8O-Lw

Euphoria should be used for the animations =] Or endorphin...which ever one thats newest

oh my god the forest looks great. i'd be so happy if skyrim topped this environment. but i'm also hoping to see some third person too...

holy crap that forest is amazing. If Skyrim looks like that I will cry with joy.

Oh, come on! The animations in Morrowind were great! :tongue:

I'm pretty sure it uses the Euphoria engine, since GTA 4 used it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi5adyccoKI

It would be great cause it would give some real weight to combat. Your enemies would stagger around realistically when you hit them.