Hey everyone!
I recently delved into some animation work for Neyyah, and captured the work in a devlog available to watch here:
Creating doorway animations is something I find really exciting ... It may appear very simple, and perhaps boring to some, but being influenced by games such as Myst and mostly Riven (particularly Riven), having doors open and shut with a click of the mouse, and having a really cool FMV sequence play out, is something I'm definitely bringing on board for Neyyah's gameplay experience!
Of course, you see it enough times, you might not want to see it again. This is why there's a click option to skip animations in Neyyah and get exactly to where you want to get to. Other skip options in the game include having 'Journey Mode' animations (walking up and down stairs / climbing up and down ladders) an option which is by default disabled upon playing the game, but can be changed if you'd like to see more animations play out. There's also going to be a 'Faster Travel' mode which skips past certain scenes to get somewhere of importance: an interactive area, etc.
The above scene shows one of the areas I have just finished rendering out an animation for! This includes two animations: 1x of the door opening, 1x of the door closing.
The animation is firstly rendered out in Open GL 'solid state' Blender mode, as seen above. In fact, compared to the final scene, the island in the background isn't even included in the animation, with Open GL or fully rendered frames. This is to reduce file sizes for actually opening the Blender file to get into the animation, and render times are reduced also. It works very nicely. However, it can also work against development too.
Certain scenes require other models / materials to be present within the animation, due to the way Cycles rendering engine works within Blender. Lighting can change drastically if you take away too much from a scene. Plus, shadows might need to be present within the animation too, so the animation matches up with the before and after renders. Riven in fact fell victim to certain scenes where, to save render times most likely, objects / models were removed, but then appeared later on in the same scene. This included the abundance of shadows in one area, then (for example) looking up, the shadows suddenly appear again. There's definitely an element of caution when doing this work, but most of the time, these elements aren't noticed by players too many times, so you can get away with certain 'mistakes'.
This is one of the scenes I have just finished setting up animations for. This includes not only an animation of opening and closing the door, but including changes to the scene which the player may have made ... So these also have to be taken into account, when rendering out the final animations. This means potentially not just 1x animation for close and open, but 2x for each!
So as you can see, many doors in Neyyah, many animations needed, but these all help bring the world to life, and link the world together too, bringing a much more real immersive experience to the player - with options to skip, if preferred :)
- Aaron Gwynaire / Defy Reality Entertainment