 Welcome back to another review and today I'm gonna take a look at a new book called Game Anim by Jonathan Cooper and it's a very interesting book at least to me because I'm not versed in the game animation aspect since I'm working in effects animation so this book was a fantastic overview over the whole process at least to me so anybody who's involved in game animation this book will be something else so I'm curious if any of you are doing game animation leave a comment let me know what you thought about the book but here it is that is the size not too big not too small lots of interesting chapters so I took some notes let's go through one by one but what's going on I'm obviously not gonna go through the whole thing I highly recommend that you buy it and check it out for yourself but there are some elements that I thought were really cool and also overlap with VFX animation and just animation in general that would be of interest to you at least I hope so as you go through you can see obviously content there's a lot of stuff in there and the chapters are really well organized in terms of it starts from the very beginning of what does it mean to be a game animator the animation principles then the elements of game animation the process of how to go through a game from beginning to finish polish aspects and then ultimately demo real tips for the end but I want to just again go through some of the elements that are really liked here and one and you can skip all this this is the author don't skip this John Cooper so again it starts with what it means to be a video game animator nice and broad with a lot of interesting general advice about animation it's actually right here about life experience it talks about not being stuck in a bubble and just exploring life and having a life outside of your work or your passion that might be just video games only and don't copy things that are familiar meaning don't play other games and then copy those games look don't look for games in terms of that is my reference and that's the same for animation in general if you do a performance you're not going to look at an animated movie and look at that and copy that you're going to act it out yourself have a body that acts out for yourself look actor stage actors just in general life observe so that you can take real elements and incorporate that into your animation and in this case for game animation anyway continues on next scene that stood out he was talking about reference and reference is not cheating sounds obvious to people who are doing this you know for a couple years that you need to use reference there are some things that are so complicated that you need visual reference you to understand the mechanics and it can give you a good inspirational jump is a good springboard for things but as a whole reference is not cheating he makes a point and i want to make that point too to anybody that's new to animation who's starting out reference is not cheating so as this continues you see game development environment just general advice and this goes up to what i have here is page 26 that is your general look at animation and then it looks at the 12 animation principles which obviously everybody should know there are great little examples about what it means in relation to games and in general all of these are in there it's very neat but what's really cool is that he has an extra chapter about new added fundamentals that would relate more to game animation so here you got five fundamentals of game animation field fluidity readability context and elegance and again not going to go and you know scan through almost every page here but you should go through and check it out it's actually really really neat and this goes through momentum blends and traditions and as it goes through again lots of examples you got special boxes that point out very hyper relevant information so to speak it's almost like a little summary of what's going on like a special point to make by the chapter or about a topic which is really neat but again it just covers a lot of really interesting elements and actually going back here when it comes to readability there's a special mention of avoiding one axis movement which is actually part of my most common animation mistake series i want to do and one of them is one axis movement also covered here in terms of game animation this is really cool a lot of this here a special mention of League of Legends just in terms of pushing the poses how far you can go with stretches and just frame by frame silhouette and everything there's really important subjects obviously cover silhouettes collision center and mass balances again this is all very game specific but there are enough really interesting overlaps between broader animation principles that apply everywhere and then it goes back into what this is very game-centric and pay attention to this if you're doing game animation same with this when you have context and placement of where the character is if a character is relaxed they're going to move one way and if the character is panicked they're going to move another way something i stress all the time is in terms of where do you place your character the set can influence the character the state of mind will influence the character again all of this applies to game animation obviously as well then continuing here you have what you need to know basic animation concepts you've got cycles transitions talks about skeletons just different setups in terms of spline work collision movements there's again a lot of detail in terms of specific game animation production additive layers very cool and actually going back if you look at the graph at the chapter here he does talk about a specific approach in his workflow where you key the whole character not separate controllers and the messy key frames over a certain amount of time it's the whole character it's very specific times so that the whole character is keyed on that one tick in terms of the Maya timeline and then you can move those around for very quick edits highly recommend that workflow approach if you haven't done this try it if it doesn't work you know throw it out but at least try it and i'm always happy when i read someone else's workflow be it in the book or online and go oh wait i do the same thing so i'm not wrong so maybe i'm on the right path it's just for me it's good validation because i'm you know even though i've done this for a couple years now you're still i mean at least i'm still insecure about how i go about it is this the right way am i doing this wrong this doesn't look good and so on and so on so if you have someone at that level goes no this is how i do it oh i do the same thing it's very validating it's very comforting so anyway it continues with a lot of specific game principles state machines additive layers partial animation it's just in terms of what you can do to get your animation done it does cover ik and all of this that we do as well but blend shapes muscle animation again everything is tailored towards game animation now in terms of the game animation workflow in reference gathering the cool thing is this don't be precious absolutely you got to go in there try something out if it doesn't work throw it out try something new it's all about a fast workflow so again i'm very very happy that this is mentioned here and this continues until here where we have game pre-production that is for sure a longer part again i'm not going to go through every page but you should look at it on your own and pay for it but as it gets to here's interesting as it talks about animation memory and compression for my very very brief stint on force unleash we helped out quickly it's completely different workflow much faster where there was there was not enough time to kind of show your blocking pass which was almost right away approved to dimension was already pretty rough my big surprise was that once i saw it in game or just in final form in cutscenes online how um there's still some jitters or contact points on tables were not as clean because of compression so there's always kind of a trade-off you gotta be careful me having no idea that was a big surprise so it's for it's interesting to read at least for me again because i'm not familiar enough with this environment these chapters here and the actually compression comes up later on as well it continues with animation tool tips which is cool and then by the way every now and then you have an interview this could be one two three or more pages which is also cool and then we get into gameplay animation again skipping through quickly but there are some interesting points here about seamless loops and walk cycles walk cycles are so having this and lots of tips about this is very very cool and especially here when it talks about what these are the common mistakes when you do this just a little list of what you could do better climbing and mandling alignment there's so much covered i mean again if you're if you know all of this you might go yeah this is a standard book and maybe it's basic i don't even know so again leave me a comment what you think is this too broad is it just detailed enough again for me not knowing this i thought it was a really nice overview with still enough detail to kind of understand the process better because i haven't done it hands-on but it definitely gives me a better overview visual feedback telegraphing follow through lots of awesome things here now to interview again there are a couple of these and then continuing on here with this is the other cinematics and facial chapter one thing that was really cool was the five c's of cinematography and there's actually a really cool i think it's a gdc clip about game animation cameras i'm going to link that in the description if i find it there will be a card with the youtube clip so card would be here check it out it's very very cool cut scenes do's and don'ts always awesome and then continuing on it gets into the facial stuff where it talks about eyeline and the thing that i took out of this was eyes are more important than lip sync and i completely agree when you look at your character you look into eyes so for me eyes and eyebrows will tell so much more and the lip sync obviously has to work but i would try to go this way and just look at is the emotion really coming through and don't worry about the lip sync having said i'm also a foreigner so i grew up with a lot of kind of bad dubs or movies or just a general lip sync that is not matching right so in american movie it's dubbed in german or in french the lip sync is just not going to match but it doesn't really matter i'm also really used to this because again i grew up with it but there's something to be said about really really well done eyes and eyebrows to convey emotion and not really not saying not caring about lip sync but knowing that it's not as important now there are some moments where someone does something more extreme with the face so yes then you got to pay attention to that but in general completely agree eyes super important and then from a technical point of view he also talks about how the eye line can change depending on the render and we have the same problem in the effects animation that you do something in your play blast it looks in a certain way because you have different lighting and different textures potentially why but it won't look the same as a high-res full feature quality render and then that render appears and then your eyes are just slightly off in terms of the look they might be able to add a texture or refraction or reflection or something some wet layer over the eyes that will change the eye lines it's super important to always double check so what's i think important for people who do shorts or their own little renders full of short stories or whatever it is and you planning on rendering it with proper lights and textures and everything just make sure that you always kind of render early at least the eye section so you know that the eye line is the same it doesn't have a certain slight off look and that might you know be problematic later on and then continues on with shape transitions and all of that good stuff and i've interviewed and then it's obviously motion capture motion capture is huge in game animation lots of very interesting tips in terms of this is cool too directing actors props and sets the setup set building virtual cameras so good there's really really good stuff in here then it continues into animation team management which at this point again i'm not going to show everything but it does talk about animation critique and having a thick skin meaning that you're going to get feedback from other people and you have to be prepared that not that i have to be unnecessarily harsh but they're going to look at is this working for this game or whatever cinematics that you have and it's the same effects animation where you're going to have different clients and clients will speak to you differently in terms of how they like or don't like something so like the main thing you need to remember is that when you work at a company you are working on someone else's reel it's someone else's vision that you are exploring fulfilling whatever term you want to use but it's basically you're doing work for someone else and it's their demo reel you mean like you're working on someone else's demo reel so you might get feedback that you disagree with or that potentially makes the shot worse or whatever it is but it shouldn't really matter you're going to do the work for someone else and every time you do a new version you put in another 110 percent every time you do a new work but you obviously you got to train up to that you get used to this so the very beginning if you're starting out animation you're sitting in delis and you have harsh feedback just don't freak out it's normal everybody's there to help just don't take it personally and it's a process that you have to go through continues on into polish and unibog and there are lots of really interesting polish hints and tips in terms of cycles, foot sliding insistencies again this brought me back to that one clip from force unleashed where leo is doing wiping on the table that was the one that felt like and people i think hands on the table i gotta find a clip and maybe if i find it it will blend it in or i'll cut this and show you the clip and then cut back to me did i show this i'm recording this now i hope i show this which again has a special mention of memory management and compression this is how your keys will look like or change depending on the compression and then we go on to the future game animation reels it talks about how you should always have a real online and be prepared that being said depending on where you work always check in terms of permissions so if for us if when a movie is in theaters we can't put our real online technically we can in terms of copyrights information we should never put our real online unless it's on a page with a password so it's hidden and just the recruiter gets that password but technically technically you don't own the rights to show things publicly unless it's in a trailer but it is very very common to see reels online and haven't really heard anything about enforcing this i got spoken to about at one point and i you hear things every now and then but in this climate i mean everybody is pretty much hired on a project to project basis you need to have your real online for a new job so i don't think it's going to be enforced as much as it's legally supposed to be but still check with things but anything that is not released for movies be it dvd blu-ray 4k or streaming whatever don't use it if it's in theaters don't use it if it's in trailers you can at least that's what i was told because that went through the whole pr machine and that is ready for public consumption so any shot that is in a trailer you can use it tells you what to use in your reel and i really like this section here you got editing your reel you got real breakdown in terms of time codes i think that was a very smart point so that you have your shot breakdown you can click to very easily talks about the resume your web presence and future technologies like ar and that's it and here you got your index and boom that is it again that is the book game and this rig you can get that online i put the link in the description if you want to play around with this i haven't yet but i will hopefully this weekend and if i did i will retroactively add a card again probably here so i'm going to point to nothing right now but once i've done this i will link to my clip about the the rig so hopefully that goes into my animation buffet section where i look at rig and do kind of rig tests but that's it jonathan cooper awesome job i don't know you but i follow you online thank you so much for all the hard work on this for me not knowing much i thought it was great if you have other thoughts i won't say complaints don't complain publicly right but you have any thoughts about oh this was cool i have stuff to add to it or yes this chapter in this book helped me in terms of this this and this so anything you want people to know because comments are there to share to educate people let other people know other than that this is game anim by jonathan cooper any type of links that will help you get this book i will put that in the description check it out if you haven't yet you can get it on amazon and many other places and that is it so if you watch this whole thing as always till the very end i highly appreciate it you know out of mind if you give me a like and a subscription hit that bell button to get all the notifications for all the uploads you know the typical youtube drill that is it for me next review is going to be probably the stream deck or another book there's another more a drawing book that i thought was really really cool some undecided but it's probably going to be the stream deck and that's going to be in a couple weeks so stay tuned thank you for watching