Quality post OP, thanks.
Quality post OP, thanks.
Thanks for the ad-hominem; it supports your inability to support your argument.
Phew.. where do I start with this?
First of all, they wouldn't fully recreate a new animation that is exactly like the old one on a new rig. They'd probably make it unique.
As for how animating a 3D rig is done? Generally, bones are established, the hierarchy of which is a very important feature in the case of the retargeting process. However, the skinning isn't actually uniquely tied to the bones, but to the mesh instead. It dictates how a mesh must deform when bones (of any kind) manipulate them. Of course, before the rig and mesh are connected, the bones need to be correctly placed, or that's gonna cause issues later, but the whole process is actually more fluid than it seems, so long as you have some knowledge of it. If you don't.. it can cause some weird and silly problems.
In the case of the Sethrak, they probably do have their own rig/skeleton, but that doesn't have much to do with the animations. As mentioned before, something called "animation retargeting" exists. That means that rigs that share a similar bone hierarchy can share animations, and even those with different hierarchies can share them where similarities exist, or where the animator wishes to fix the tiny discrepancies manually.
This makes you half-right. For the neck, head and the tail, they probably did animate that separately, like they did for the Saberon tails. Saberon also used the worgen animations (quite obviously), but the tails were animated uniquely. For the other parts, like the hands, they probably did not actually change the animations much if at all. This works because the retargeting process tells the separate bones that coincide to copy the "transform information" (rotation, movement or scaling; rotation in the case of animating characters)
See it like this: You have a forearm that is twice as long for one model than the other. Problems, right? No. It just transfers the transform information to the other rig, so it tells both forearm stubs that on frame 15, it rotates by a degree or 5 in the y axis (side to side), or 10 in the z axis (up and down) rather than trying to make the two skeletons conform to each other.
First of all: watch this. Furthermore, Unreal Engine 4 is an Engine, Maya is a 3D modeling, unwrapping and animation package. They're not the same, but they can have some similar features where need be. Chances are that they built animation retargeting into their engine, however.
Dark Iron Dwarves, Highmountain Tauren and Void Elves are for the most part literally the Dwarf, Tauren and Blood Elf meshes, too, so that's not only sharing a similar rig, but also most of the same 3D model.
As for proof? First of all, Blizzard themselves said they can do animation retargeting now - they've made sure to mention it at Blizzcon.
Secondly, the new class combat animations in Legion. You don't really think they animate it 100% the same way for every race and gender combination? Even Pandaren males and females have the DK 1H Frost animation where the character points a weapon like the Lich King does.
All-in-all, your post isn't 100% wrong. For, say, Tauren to Night Elf, you would need changes to be made for, say, the head, as well as the leg bones to account for the different leg structure, but these are relatively minor things, especially compared to creating a whole new animation from scratch
I noticed this too weeks back. One good testable option is, first, be a druid (in my case, Nelf). Then use Orb of the Sindorei to transform into a Belf. Use Wild Growth.
Belfs have the new Wild Growth casting animations, but Belfs cannot be Druids so they will never "naturally" be casting WG. At first I thought it was a hint that Belves would be allowed to become Druids next expac, as I discovered it before Blizzcon. Then shortly came to the same conclusion that you did OP: That this is because their animations/skeletons are now shared.
He isn't that wrong.
PC nightborne do use skeleton that's originally designed for nelves, they also share majority of (all?) animations. Model obv is different. At least that's how things are now in 735, they may give them a set of unique animations.
I dunno why you don't like the phase "copypaste", we do a lot of copy-pasting w/ slight adjustments at work, there's nothing wrong w/ that and there's nothing wrong w/ calling it what it's to a certain extent.
There are some huge misconceptions in this thread:
-Models use similar skeletons, that's true. However they don't share most of their animations.
In MoP blizzard created the exact same monk animations for all models, but they were baked into every single model file. If they used the same animation file for all races, there would be huge graphical bugs, since their skeleton size is different, and translation doesn't work the same way for humans as for gnomes. Even when you copy an animation from a model to another you have to manually adjust each translation.
-Skeletons are not identical and don't have the same amount of bones. You can't just copy-paste an animation. It requires some extra manual work.
-You can merge the animations of two different models into one with scripts and some manual adjustment. It's not that difficult. That's why the Sethrak model uses pandaren and worgen animations.
-Allied races DO copy the same animations of older races. For example, if you open the void elf .skel file it references to the blood elf male model, and copies the exact same skeleton, attachments and animations. However they can use some of their own animations, such as the nightborne idle pose, and that's stored in a different .skel file.
No, but they do use the same animations, and the .skel file is the proof, since they take more than 250 animations from the night elf model.
Everything major in this post is correct, except for the continuation of the "Sethrak use Male Pandaren animations". They don't.
The Male Pandaren never makes this pose in any of the attack animations.
This pose appears to be the base special melee attack animation for the Sethrak, whereas the Mel pandaren's base special attack has them spin around once before they raise their weapon high and bring their weapon down, never spinning the weapon in the air.
Last edited by Cradix; 2017-12-10 at 08:43 PM.
Of course it does. However, those animations are Sethrak animations, not Pandaren or Worgen animations, as the OP claimed.
Of course. But I'm just jumping in to say that Sethrak attck animations aren't Pandaren attaack animations.Even if they didn't use the pandaren animation the point is that it's not difficult to merge animations and Blizzard has done it before with other creature models.
Expecially the snakebite one, because Pandaren do not bite their enemies by extending their neck like a snake.
Thanks for the info, OP. This surely was an enjoyable and at the same time informative read. And I completely agree that this has nothing to do with laziness, but instead it boosts effectiveness and content production rate at the same time.
Rofl about the dance studio part, people are still waiting for that useless piece of no value/ no gameplay improvement feature.
Oh yeah, it's not just "hahahaha i transfer this older animation and it'll translate perfectly from wolf person to snake person." like some people like to proclaim. Work is still put into it, but it's manageable work. It merely means that they can take on multiple things at once rather than one animation update per raid tier or something like that.
Nothing lazy about it, just efficient. Some people are silly and have major confirmation bias going on, don't mind them.
If anything, this is a good thing, as it gives both us and Blizzard more freedom to add cool stuff, but negative nancies will always be negative.
Reusing animations doesn't necessarily mean that they can't make new ones as well.
I want to reach out to thank Inico and Yarathir for correcting some of my misunderstandings, here.
When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like injustice.
Makes sense why there is that weird bug with the nightborn model shifting into a tauren or worgen, thanks OP
My my, that's pretty damn interesting.
Here's to a glorious future of all the races with all the animations! :P