How Animation for Movie and Video Game is Different

Difference between Animation for Movie and Video Game

Creating animations for Movie is much different from creating animations for a video game. Even though the same principles and software tools of animation apply to both mediums, the techniques and processes differ greatly between the two. This Kshitij Vivan animation blog will give you a strong understanding of how creating animation for movie and video game both are different.

How Animation for Movie and Video Game is Different from each other in Animation

Video game animator needs to make the perfect animation that looks good from 360 degrees. Movie designer can focus on the camera view and ignore everything the camera doesn’t capture. In video games, if the player turns around, he is not going to see the director with cameras.

Game animator needs to make sure that if the player can move and see through an area, there should be something on the other side and the more important if the player decides to move over there. In movies, you can use static images like in the image below, in games you normally wouldn’t do that as a player has control of the movement and camera.

Body mechanic pays a bigger role in game animation as you will be animating a lot of walking, jumping, fighting, running, dodging, falling, dying and such. So there is less focus on acting except for a cut-scene or a story-driven game like uncharted.

Game animators need to focus on small cycles in less time frame, and they need to blend. Unlike in movies where there is usually a choreographed fight scene for example in the game the players decide when to kick, jump, slide, run, reload and other things. So the small animated cycles of a few seconds are put together to create the complete animation experience for the players.

Besides body mechanic timing is also the important differences in-game animation as the player input is decided when the animation is starting, so it needs to blends into another animation without interfering with gameplay. For instance, the reload animation in games need to be realistic and simple enough for a player to jump into the fight but also pose a challenge.

Use of Sound and Sound Quality

The real-time rendering constraints are also why games before the next-generation consoles avoided adding sound other than the musical backdrops in repeating WAV or MIDI format; adding voices to characters other than the generic “beast” sounds would double or triple the strain on the rendering output engines, and slow the game down even further. Again, this limitation is not visible in movies, where speech and various sound effects are essential for all the effect; but because movies aren’t being rendered frame-by-frame as you see, there’s no need to cut corners on the audio.

Programming for Interactivity vs. Passive Viewing

The next difference in animation movie and video game is to keep in mind is the amount of programming that goes into a video game animation, rendering and interactivity. Because a movie is meant to be viewed but not interacted with programming inherent is only oriented towards the producing the visible results without any input from a user side, the models don’t need to be able to react to stimuli appropriately due to not reacting at all.

In video games, every action is controlled by user side, motion sequences must be programmed in as a response to individual or combinations of buttons; then as a result objects or beings in the environment have to be programmed to be “sensitive” to the actions of the user-controlled models, to enact their programmed motion sequences at the appropriate moments.

The next difference in animation for movie and video game is to keep in mind is the amount of programming that goes into a video game animation, rendering and interactivity. Because a movie is meant to be viewed but not interacted with programming inherent is only oriented towards the producing the visible results without any input from a user side, the models don’t need to be able to react to stimuli appropriately due to not reacting at all.

In video games, every action is controlled by user side, motion sequences must be programmed in as a response to individual or combinations of buttons, then as a result objects or individuals in the environment have to be programmed to be “sensitive” to the actions of the user-controlled models, to enact their programmed motion sequences at the appropriate moments.

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