Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone, I just wanted to point out the issues from a technical standpoint. I am a character animator, and I know quite a bit about what goes into making a character for a game or film. Don’t take this as a “it won’t happen” post, I just want to be realistic for those of you who are unfamiliar with 3D modeling, rigging, animation, and armor design.

Most common suggestions I see in this thread and others:

1. Add “toggle” for upright stance for Charr.
2. Armor “wasn’t designed” for Charr, fix it (tail area, helmets, other clipping issues).
3. Add body proportion options in character creation.

For #1 (part A), making a character stand a certain way is done through animation. Literally any kind of movement or deformation of a polygon is animation. Let me tell you guys, animation is one of the most expensive parts of making 3D assets. That’s why you don’t see nearly that many new animations coming into the game after release. Heart of Thorns will bring plenty of new ones, but that’s due to the HoT budget.

Now for #1 (part. Animation in video games is more complicated than you might think. Every character has a set of loops that are cycled through depending on the action you perform. For example your character might turn his head and scratch his neck from time to time when idle. Then when you press W your character transitions into a run cycle animation. When you let go of W, the character transitions back to the idle. In fact in GW2 every character has a “stop running” animation where they kind of throw their weight forward as they stop running, to show their momentum being slowed down. So in GW2 when you stop running, you transition from “run cycle” -> “stop running” -> “idle”. Each of these animations must flow together smoothly without any weird twitching, twinning, teleportation, spazzing out, etc. They must feel natural, otherwise the animator has failed at his/her job. So not only does every single animation loop have to look good, but they all have to transition between each other smoothly, usually through some kind of network or game engine system, through which the animator must define the relationship between each animation and it’s associated action.

What this means is that “adding a toggle” is much more complicated than simply making a check box and pressing some magic “stand upright” button in the game engine. The stance would have to be created. It would need an idle animation. It would need to transition into other animations smoothly.

This is getting long so I’ll continue in another post…

Xenon.4537:

Most common suggestions I see in this thread and others:

1. Add “toggle” for upright stance for Charr.
2. Armor “wasn’t designed” for Charr, fix it (tail area, helmets, other clipping issues).
3. Add body proportion options in character creation.

So I would say #2 is the most likely area where you could expect fixes/changes. They could conceivably attach a small piece of tail armor to every outfit to cover up the ugliness of tails clipping straight through things. It would basically mean creating a new piece of geometry, making sure the shader matches the original outfit in question, and parenting it to the tail part of the skeleton. There might be some other technical hurdles, but that’s the gist of it. The toughest part I think is the fact that there are so many different outfits in the game, that it would be a significant job for a single artist, or a smaller job for a bunch of artists. Either way, that’s resources Anet could use for HoT, or future LS episodes. I’m not sure Anet will ever bother with it, but there’s always hope.

As for other clipping issues, I assume you mean horns sticking out of odd places, shoulder pads clipping through horns or helmets, and legs clipping through skirts. Horns are an issue for certain helmets, like the gas mask. It’s really difficult to align horns on a head which can be shaped and resized in many ways during character creation. Not to mention the horns themselves stick out at different angles. Addressing this would be an incredible migraine and I doubt Anet would find it economically viable to spend time dealing with it. You would need to create some kind of offset variable for every horn type based on the head shape from character creation (that means the custom head proportions YOU input with sliders), and that variable would have to adjust for the “horn hole” in the gas mask to make it line up perfectly. And then they would have to do that for every other helmet in the game which has this problem, because every helmet is shaped a little differently.

As for clipping shoulder pads… That’s an even more annoying issue to go back and fix after the fact. The easiest solution would be to resize the shoulder armor so that it’s small enough to never clip anything. But then people might complain the shoulders on certain armors are now way too small. After all, the clipping only happens in this case during an animation. See my previous post about animation… It’s simply too much work to overhaul animations just to fix this specific issue.

Your best bet here is to voice your concerns on Charr armor clipping, and hope that Anet takes this into account when designing future armors. It’s somewhat unlikely they would go back and overhaul old armors, especially when there’s plenty of money to be made releasing new ones in HoT and the Gem store. Afaik most of the armor released post-launch have been much more considerate of Charr body design and have less clipping issues than old armors.

continued…

Please lets not also forget the lore reason for the flame legion CASTER classes being the ones standing more upright. They are the ones that lorded over the other Charr and took that posture as a means of establishing dominance over the other Charr.

Since they don’t roll that way anymore, it makes sense that they stand in their more natural posture.

Xenon.4537:

Most common suggestions I see in this thread and others:

1. Add “toggle” for upright stance for Charr.
2. Armor “wasn’t designed” for Charr, fix it (tail area, helmets, other clipping issues).
3. Add body proportion options in character creation.

And now we come to #3. Adding sliders for body proportions would be basically the same as the facial sliders. In older engines this is all joint driven, which means in order to add it to an existing character in GW2 would mean changing the rig. If you are unfamiliar with rigging for animation, go ahead and look it up. I won’t be surprised if your head explodes.

Every joint in a rig is yet another thing the game engine has to process. Adding more and more joints to a skeleton just for body sliders, and then having anywhere from 1 to 150 of that character on screen in GW2… Yeah.

Not to mention once they actually make the new rig with the new joints for the body sliders, they then have to rebind the skin (attach the 3D polygon mesh to the skeleton and paint deformation weight values on it). Then they have to make sure none of the new proportions clip through existing armor, and if so, they have to rebind those armors to compensate. You’d probably end up with even MORE clipping issues than you were attempting to solve in the first place.

Some newer game engines can support blend shapes, or morph targets, which basically are deformers which animate the vertices themselves, but this is just as much work, if not more. I’m not sure if GW2 uses them or joints, but adding either of them in after the fact… you might as well ask Anet to create an entire new race from scratch. It’s just as much work for them in the end.