The Animation Process Of Ori & The Blind Forest

Tasked with creating hundreds of character animations that would would blend seamlessly into a painted 2D world, but without any ability to illustrate, what technical and creative tricks could you employ to succeed? This GDC 2015 Animation Bootcamp talk from James Benson discusses Ori & The Blind Forest's successful attempt to create thousands of Ghibli-style frames of animation with limited time, people and personal skillset.

[@taigahira]

the fact they had a tiny group and they made such beautiful game is just... wow.

[@Drstrange3000]

This game has some of the best animation I ever seen in my life!

[@benjamindeh873]

The animation AND art. Wish we had more games like this, it was just a beautiful experience.

[@_Executer]

@@wallacesousuke1433 How long have you played it for

[@iquew4389]

@@_Executerhe prob played it for 0.000000001s

[@Zekian]

I would have liked to have heard how the programmers overcame some of the technical challenges in both the render pipeline and asset creation pipeline.

[@RoyBrown777]

Asset creation would be far more interesting than the programming side. This game would be fairly basic in comparison to most modern games.

[@RajaniBaburajan]

@Blackfalk i think it's actually 3d, because, i haven't played the game, but I have seen a portion where you see a 3d block of water.

[@benjamindeh873]

Every time I think of Ori and the blind forest I think back to the escape of the tree with the water flooding under you. The music, the atmosphere, the art it was all so beautiful. I remember going "woah!" instead of "Omfgrun i has tosurvive!". Wish developers made more beautiful games like this.

[@WoofySKD]

holy shit this guy saying he animated each frame of several states in like 10 different angles like it is no big deal damm that's so crazy/amazing

[@CossackHD]

There are extra frames for Ori turning his head to right while crawling from the Swallows Nest in the prologue, you can make Ori look behind him by trying to move him right. I mean, there is like a dozen of poses in the "FEELS INTENSIFY" sequence and all of those poses have "look back" animation which I didn't discover until 70+ hours into the game! O_O A bit pity that movement animations are half the framerate at maximum speed (30 FPS animation of running while playing at 60 FPS), the memory limit doesn't seem to explain this (because it's just around 15 texture files for Ori movement in-game), unless it was a trade off for trying to make X360 version of the game.

[@Hudston]

If I were to guess, other than performance, I'd say it's because a lower frame rate more closely mimics the feel of traditional animation.

[@CossackHD]

Gary Hudston that's a valid point, maybe they decided to use 30 FPS animations although the game runs in 60 FPS. They did use 120 FPS animation for fast walking as a method of transition to running however. Varying animation framerate adds a bit of inconsistency.

[@PixelThorn]

@@CossackHD I think there's too much emphasis on framerates - I know many want games to run at 144 frames per second and whatnot but if you can get the same quality of movement at 30 fps in a 2D game instead of 60 then why wouldn't you?

[@CossackHD]

@@PixelThorn it looks a bit weird seeing 2 same animation frames per 2 unique ingame frames and makes animations just a bit less sharp. Ori's glow and motion blur help to hide that. The new game has 60 FPS animations and they pushed further with squshing/stretching - looks a lot more fluid. I liked watching new trailers at half the speed - easier to understand why 60 FPS looks so awesome.

[@JordanSemrow]

oh man, just watching that opening montage and the subsequent scene at the beginning had me tearing up at work...

[@benjamindeh873]

That montage is so beautiful. I wish there was a BIG metal print of the frame where Naru and Ori are holding the vine.

[@Skinkemann]

Really fun talk! Ori is such a beautiful game, it was cool to get some insight into how it was done! Excited to see whatever Moon does next :D

[@CossackHD]

I tried to mod the game by editing the baked frames of Ori, I made like 30 frames and then looked up total number of frames on all those PNGs and it was over a thousand so I went NOPE and terminated the idea. Interestingly, frames for Ori are saved in Sein files, and then there's oriC file which resembles Sein's visual (crystal ball). Could that be a file naming mistake or was Ori meant to be called Sein?

[@AnxietyOpossum]

Sorry that this is quite late of a comment, but I had to say this. If you look at the early concepts for the game, the original title was actually just "Sein" Also, the original sequences have stuff like the spirit tree being a giant ent-like creature, and Ori talking to Sein at the end of the Ginso Tree sequence! Just some cool stuff I thought I'd share :D

[@milddiffuse]

Skinkemann Ori and the will of the wips (Ori 2)

[@infinitytrainbook4394]

@@AnxietyOpossum original name to ori was sein and sein was ori So ori didnt talked it was sein

[@astrobaboon8623]

Go play Ori and the Will of the Wisp now that it's out.

[@baronvonbeandip]

I absolutely love this game. I haven't taken so many screenshots of a game in my life.

[@AnxietyOpossum]

As an aspiring 3d modeler, and animator, I can't wait to watch my way through this :D

[@WowDailyDose]

Aniimmaator huh?? My teams been looking for an animator recently (For a Game very much inspired by Ori). Any thoughts on checking out our project?

[@AnxietyOpossum]

I would, but I have literally no experience or training XD It's more of just a personal goal for me to achieve one day :) Thanks for offering tho!

[@Scroteydada]

maaz baig Inspired by Ori? Is it still happening? Have you disclosed anything about it?

[@WeaselLevelDesign]

Thanks very much for sharing this with us mate, and for making such fantastic visual storytelling :)

[@Alucard94able]

this video is something to watch if you are already in game design but a bit confusing if you aren't.

[@tazzuki]

I would love to see this kind of animation style made into some 2D mmorpg

[@RaoulWB]

It blew my mind, awesome talk

[@HAWXLEADER]

So I guess modern Unity could just run the rig itself? Rendering and HDR have come so far since unity 3. Now we actually have Lit 2D.

[@bee_irl]

HUUUUUGE RESPECT!!

[@bence0302bence]

Bizony, Máté :)

[@Tangakkai]

Just bought it during the summer sale on steam and immediately i thought: Mononoke! 😍

[@melficeskye292]

Love this game can't wait too see game you make next definitely would love to see your take on a classic old school style rpg

[@pabloalberto1754]

This game is a masterpiece

[@captainkev10]

One of my favorite games, Ori, referencing one of my favorite movies, Princess Mononoke.

[@nabla9790]

Hi I am very late to this, but I have a question about the atlases at 8:25 - why did they have to make dynamic chroma key generation if they could just use alpha?

[@visclo4782]

So the takeaway as a developer is make the art pipeline perfect and the game will look as good as the artists vision and skill. Great talk for a beautiful game!

[@SOXAvisual]

Dude! are you going to drink the water from the bottle on your hand or not? just kidding, the game looks amazing, great speech

[@1.618_Murphy]

If I could work with the ORI's 3rd sequel with Moon Studio! 😭😭 But I'm really an amateur who love Ori and my expertise is intermediate!! Working hard to make myself better!! Don't know if I can make it before they start working on the 3rd project! ☹️

[@DenerWitt]

would love to have many of these systems he talks about. I know unity has very nice 2D tools now, but I dont think it has all this builtin??

[@PixelThorn]

No but you can create these tools yourself for unity using C# - it's not that hard, I created a custom camera system for Xcom like gameplay

[@EcchiSamurai]

I had seen a video long ago back in 2006 I think of a creature that looked like Ori, but it was a goat-beast hybrid thing and it had to fight its way through a forest. It was like a cross between Ori and a video called "The Guardian" and I can not for the life of me find this video anywhere DX

[@CutiePink]

+EcchiSamurai This might be a stretch, but could you possibly be thinking of the Brackenwood series by Adam Phillips?

[@EcchiSamurai]

IceBlueDraco You sir... I thank you. Thats exactly what I was thinking of! :D I have been searching for years!! Thank you so much! :3 I don't know why but Ori reminded me of those animations.

[@Budello42]

This is a wonderful pipeline.

[@SwarnimArun]

Just confused, so where does the rendering of 3D models occur in Unity or 3DS????

[@WowDailyDose]

3D Max. They are imported as sprites.

[@360dom360]

I would imagine this effect would also be possible in Blender?

[@getgle]

@@360dom360 yes

[@magikamush3717]

Can someone tell me how the foot placement was done without IK? I can't conceptualise how he said it was done in the presentation.

[@N090UGY]

I agree, he wasn't clear as too what he was doing.Im watching this a second time to understand.

[@falxie_]

He refers to Ori as "he," I was under the impression that Ori didn't have a gender

[@falxie_]

@@prezadent1 Nah dude

[@falxie_]

@Connor Gregorius Just an interesting thing I noticed

[@kiara6237]

He is not ''genderless'' or ''nonbinary'' bullshit, Ori is he or she, depending on the player interpretation, the game programmer said that.

[@GayDemiDemiboy]

@kiara6237 that's quite uncalled for don't you think? Here's the thing: Ori is not a person, nor are they a real species. Iirc, he is a spirit type thing. I hope you look back at this comment and facepalm at how stupid you were. Although I do agree that it is up to player interpretation

[@MrQwerty2524]

Holyshit! It's 3D???!! Redownloading the game right now to replay it :D

[@SiriusXification]

No. Everything was made in 3d and then baked into sprites. you wont see actual 3d there.

[@SiriusXification]

You're right. The water is 3d and the parallaxing is so good that it may aswell be 3d. But in terms of the actual game - the character may be a 3d character but does it really matter when you cannot shift perspective on-demand in game? This is the sortof thing you cant shoehorn into either definition

[@ClemensZockt]

if thought that it had to be a 3D game wich is just shown to you from a fixed side perspective, usually used in 2D games. the fore- and background oviously is in 2D on different levels of depth into the field of view, BUT there has to be some 3D elements. If you go under water, you see some change in the perspective. I programmed a little arcade platformer just for myself, that I wanted to have a 3D look but in a 2D top view perspective. Easiest solution: Just use 3D models for the main layer, but just give them 2 dimensions to move around :D + fixed camera angle = done. Not so easy for Ori, but the main idea is the same. You can not tell the difference as a player, when you are forced to watch the game from a given perspective. For the player my game was a 2D game that "looked 3D in some way". As the dev, it was a 3D game, forced to work in just 2D (looked really funny when youi floated around in the 3D space..looked very...emtpy, small and lost in nowhere)

[@fantasyhaven3900]

In fact it is 2.5 D. :D but whatever, it still amazing.

[@rainbowsky6257]

I had a feeling that animation that beautiful couldn't have just been hand drawn. I guess I was right.

[@snipy8862]

man, he drank a lot of water. Well, maybe not a lot but certainly very often

[@homeslice3964]

MDMA

[@migasx4933]

Bro Gareth Cocker is a soundtrack GOD producer

[@KlingThePoster]

man, I have to play this game with a controller now

[@nicolassantos5541]

Awesome!!!

[@jan050375]

i am confused, one minute he is talking about 3D models and rigging, the next minute he is talking about sprites

[@ibrahimalgwaiz5568]

The sprites are only output or artifacts. They are generated using a rigged 3D model. I'm not sure if this is what is confusing to you

[@musashidanmcgrath]

He's rendering a fully rigged 3D character offline and using the frames as a spritesheet.

[@Horos101]

@Bilbous Bagoda Ori is a 3D model. They ran a computer program to take pictures of the model during each animation at each frame to generate 2D sprites, which is what you see in the final game (a lot of 2D sprites).

[@rikrishshrestha5421]

@@Horos101 exactly ,Good explanation. This is same as what's happening in Clash of clans and Clash royale. Looks 3d but is 2d sprites.

[@FeastTheSenses]

Since they were using sprites, it must mean that the translation of the character Ori had to be programmed rather than given by the 3d models' animation right? Isn't that like doing the same work twice kind of?

[@person8203]

The animations were rendered down to frames in sprite sheets then sync'd to player state like you would with 3d but without all the headache of 3d. No interpolation of bones or limbs and such is needed if that's what you mean.

[@jeremyvansnick2568]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/o2nPgKqojLOVe7sm51s That's what I'm talking about, the rig is imported in Unity to give data. He probably used root motion, how to sync that with the sprite?

[@weirdboyrox]

Absolute masterpiece, the game looks more similar style to the game Legend of Mana :)

[@3DxPOD]

Great speech :)

[@JuddMan03]

Huh. I thought this game was 3D rendered. Wow.

[@eloujtimereaver4504]

Kind of.

[@indoxperia]

Great explanation.

[@ardoos]

FGS dont put the bottle back on the table..

[@SoldatDuChristChannel]

isnt ori 2 wotw all in 3d?

[@talhazaryab3300]

Thank God 0 dislike.

[@1316Salva]

Wrong.

[@CossackHD]

I've 259 likes and 2 dislikes on my Ori review video :3

[@d_pikachu9388]

too soon!, evil peeps already arrived

[@hibryd7481]

Who is this talk supposed to be for?

[@alxdrksoul]

Anyone who wants to know how ori was animated.

[@magnvss]

So beautiful game. That's why I resent that they didn't make it a super-easy option for those who can't overcome (at times) such difficult tasks. It would be more children and casual players friendly and it would allow for the enjoyment of such pretty artistic environment.

[@iwtd6]

Wait you said its a he and him?

[@DuolosX]

This guy talks as though he absolutely hates everything about the game, his job, and his company...

[@barrabinfc]

this guy had some serious coke ...so anxious

[@rektchord]

Or Probably something to do with him standing in front of a load of people and talking.

[@homeslice3964]

And the coke.

[@MihaiAndreiStanimir]

"bla-bla-bla"?

[@emmanuelhenne]

Gosh the guy is annoying, was he forced to do that speech or what ?

[@Kiabugboy]

You know he might see this video along with the comments and yours might just sting enough to override all the other positive ones. Of course you can point out your opinion about how he handled the talk and what you think was his shortcomings, but how about you do it in a respectful way. People nowadays are so entitled to spew out their opinion all over the place just because they can and they forget if the way they're saying it can hurt others

[@PixelThorn]

@@Kiabugboy the comment section wasn't much better in -05, but I do feel that people's behavior on the internet had actually become less toxic over time

[@moestealth85]

Interesting talk and insightful to many game makers specially with the 2d animation pipeline. But annoying guy with foul language on stage =\

[@alexoelkers2723]

your annoying and disrespectful