April 2005 Sputnik Summary

 

How To Walk

 

Speaker: Tom Forsyth, RAD Game Tools:

 

We all take walking for granted, but it takes most of us between five and ten years to get it really working well. So it is hardly surprising that it takes more than hitting "play" on a looping animation to get a realistic-looking walk cycle in a game.

 

In practice, it takes a close co-operation between coder and animator to pick the right types of animations and the right ways to blend them. Somehow, the conflicting demands of the human perception system and a responsive user feedback must be reconciled to produce fluid animations while keeping the game fun to play. This talk presents a variety of these techniques from the simple to the involved, and introduces some important ground rules when doing animation within the context of a game.

 

Tom Forsyth has been coding graphics for twenty years, and has worked on a number of games (including the fabulous but obscure StarTopia). He now works at RAD Games Tools in Kirkland on the animation and mesh toolkit "Granny 3D".