Can you go in a little more depth about this, or point me to where I can learn more about what they did with the animation in the recent Rayman games? That's a topic that really interests me, even though I have no real technical knowledge about it.
About a year ago some people on GAF were asking me to make a thread about this and I said I would, but I just haven't had any time (if I were to do it, I'd want to do it right, with visual examples). I still plan on doing it sometime after Cuphead is released and I'm not being smashed under crunch. But I'll give the briefest description here:
1) Marionetting - this is where animation is made out of single still frames that are cut up into pieces along the joints (elbows, shoulders, etc). Those still pictures (or "bones") are moved around by the engine. This gives a VERY "flash" look, as the character looks like a marionette that is being jangled around rather than being animated.
2) Morphmation - this is animation that is done by taking a still frame and then warping (stretching, expanding, shrinking) that image to infer motion. It is also usually done in engine, rather than frame by frame. This is often used for "breathing" animations on figures, as you can just expand and deflate the stomachs or squash and stretch the still frame without having to redraw it.
The above two styles are used often for a number of reasons:
1) It's cheaper because you only have to do a couple of drawings and then manipulate them in engine
2) It can operate at any framerate, because the animation is just moving still images around the screen
3)You can have extremely detailed art assets, because they only have to be drawn a couple of times.
4) Editing animations is very easy and doesn't require any re-drawing, so tweaking timings and motions is a breeze.
5) You can create tons of variation without having to draw a billion things. For a different sword, you just draw the sword once, then manipulate it in space, no need to draw every frame in the animation again.
Then, there's traditional animation. Which is literally just drawing every single frame of an animation. Classic animation stems from cinema, so the standard was in 24frame per second. Most American animation is done on 'twos', which means that there are 12 frames of animation per second (each frame is held for two visual beats). Most cheap Japanese animation is done on 'threes' (where every frame is held for three visual beats). There's variation, of course, as fast motion requires ones or twos, and very slow motion can be on threes or worse to save money/time.
But back in the 30s, animation all was done on 'ones'...which is literally drawing a new frame for every single visual beat. 24 full fat frames per second. So that's what we did and it goes a long way to why the game looks the way it does. It also means that it takes twice or three times as long as normal animation. We're over 50,000 frames at this point.
Same thing applies for most animated movies and shows. There are very few that move with 24 different animation frames, most just use repeated frames, even if the camera pans at 24 fps.
How many frames does CupHead use for animating the characters? I asked once if its a "frame by frame" animation but at 60fps it obviously isn't. But it still looks smoother than average animations so how does it compared with the likes of Akira, Roger Rabbit and The Thief and the Cobbler in number of different frames per second?
As noted above, we're on ones, so it's 24fps of unique animations. Though, if I'm being honest (and don't tell anyone), we've had to cheat for gameplay purposes on some animations...we occasionally run up to 40fps of unique animations to get the timings correct.
I don't know what Akira runs at,
but Roger Rabbit is twos for the most part (12fps) with ones (24fps) for fast motions. Edit, I'm wrong, it's on ones.
