#I’ve also been spending a lot time trying to rework my art and improve overall

[xxhatchetxx]

They are…..buddies

[kingofthewilderwest]

it kinda bugs me how they cant make httyd3 longer just so they can emphasize the story in a deeper meaning, like your post abt it being disproportionate. httyd3 had a LOT more plot than httyd2 and we can already see how it has to cramp so much and why that makes D2's pace felt pretty fast. the structure of the story is actually well planned.. perfect, to be exact! but the execution like putting pauses, necessary humor, longer dialogue, is whats needed to make it um, understandable? im not sure..

this isnt meant to judge the movie as bad though! but its a question ive been asking why they cant do it longer, for that sake. is it the budget? was Dean really certain the script is okay? or is it meant to be like this so people can interpret the movie their way? (oof that one is confusing).. i dont know, i want to ask about your thoughts on that >

From this.

It’s an interesting conversation for sure! I believe that THW doesn’t have to be longer to be extremely successful in the ideas it needs to convey! The core ideas being:

Toothless cannot be a wild dragon and strong alpha leader with humans. Other dragons probably deserve the respect of needing wild dragon needs, too.

Humans like Grimmel are extremely dangerous to dragons and will continue to arise, so dragons need to go to an area separate from humans to live in optimal peace.

Hiccup and Toothless’ powerful friendship will separate (insofar as physical location) due to the first two points

I know you’re not the only person I’ve talked to who wanted a longer time because you feel like certain elements were cramped, needed more breathing room, or that dangerous plot points didn’t get enough sense of weight. More time would presumably give that flow and sense of scale and danger. Now, it’s true that more time would give us more content to develop these things. That said, I believe solutions aren’t always “add more.” Creating good art isn’t about adding new things; it’s about knowing when to take away or alter, and how to make every second of your creation count optimally.

I remember when I was doing my music composition degree, my instructors hammered into me what would make a good final piece: the editing process of deleting measures - even measures that were really good! - because they didn’t fit what the final product needed. It’s painful to delete, but ultimately, it’s freeing; instead of making a music piece more cluttered to put all possible good ideas in, I can make it less cluttered, more manageable, more beautiful, more meaningful, and more effective to audiences. A better overall piece isn’t putting in every good idea I have; it’s leaving the piece with the beautiful ideas it needs.

I suggest The Hidden World doesn’t need added materials so much as it needs refining what’s already there.

Budget, production green lighting, and carefulness to the script all seem to have been done. HTTYD 3 was given a longer production time than originally planned. They pushed back the date exactly so they could make their best product. Interviews with people like DeBlois and Spielberg (who read several definitions of the script) talk about how much the script was transformed and bettered through its drafts. They did enough tweaking and care to rework the script. As for budget, the movie was 129 million USD, which sure was the cheapest of the HTTYD trilogy to create, but it’s about on par with what DreamWorks has spent on other movies like Home and Trolls - it’s not like there was skimping - and it’s all about making your money count, which I think this glorious, top notch animation quality film effectively did. So from what I’ve heard, I think production ran fine and we can’t question THW there.

I think most of THW’s problems can be solved simply by tweaking how scenes go down, taking a few small elements out, and adding a few small elements in. It doesn’t need time changes; it needs internal modifications to what’s already there. What I propose wouldn’t change much of the movie’s length - though maybe I we could add 5-8 minutes for things like a longer climax.

1. To Feel Less “Cluttered” or “Rushed”

The movie didn’t feel rushed to me or too cluttered, but it’s cluttered. You’re right. In addition to creating less clutter, my suggested tweaks will clear up time THW can spend elsewhere, streamline THW into fewer palatable essential ideas, and give a slight tone makeover that will add more sense of danger and conflict that THW needs.

Fewer humor side gags with minor characters (and less time spent on them). The gang’s antics are fun additions, yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re central to what the plot needs. Spending too much time with them adds clutter and takes away from plot-central, tone-central material. There’s a huge gaggle of gags in THW, more than any movie needs in a less-than-two-hour-long run time. Do we need all these to give THW its comic relief? Don’t get me wrong - I loved the humor - but time needs to be prioritized, and the movie will be improved once “less is more.”

Less time with Tuffnut’s pep talks. This goes with my first point. This comedic gag was lengthy in particular. It’s in part because it connects to the idea of Hiccstrid marrying, which THW does make more central in its themes. However, I also propose:

Spend less time (or delete) the will-they won’t-they marry Hiccstrid plot. THW intends to parallel Hiccup and Toothless maturing into adulthood, including their romantic connections. However, a will-they won’t-they marry subplot in Hiccstrid isn’t needed to create that parallel. Not to mention: it can be uncomfortable to have this undertone of romance as “required” adulthood maturation, and the fact that Hiccstrid are so close and intimate makes it feel “off” that they’re so uncomfortable talking about marriage. Spend less time here, simply make fans aware they’re going to marry in the future but not today, and return to the main relationships THW needs to pay attention to: that of Hicctooth and Nightlight. 

2. To Make Grimmel a Greater Sense of Threat

One of the central points is that Grimmel is extremely dangerous and represents one of many humans that’ll continue to be a threat to dragons. While Grimmel can be overcome, Hiccup will need to interact with Grimmel in such a way he can understand that dragons and humans cannot coexist in today’s civilization without continuing to risk danger, and that it’s best for everyone to live happily in two separate civilizations. It’s not being defeated by the enemy’s oppression, but taking a brilliant countermeasure to give humans and dragons both a better existence.

Making Grimmel feel like a greater sense of threat, and helping audience members understand what Grimmel represents overarchingly of humanity’s current antagonistic state, will help us and Hiccup process why a separation is best. This can be done by:

Show Grimmel’s impact on human society. All we’d have to do is change what his base looks like: it could be located in an area taken over from another human civilization, showing his army’s power and place in this world over humans.

Greater weight placed on Berk’s exodus. The Hooligans lost their home, but it’s played too lightly. It’s not written optimally as an emotionally impacting or destabilizing moment, which decreases the sense of threat Grimmel has. Instead of having the Hooligans excited to find New Berk, show them grieving. They can butt against Hiccup’s ideas of finding the Hidden World, but instead in a way where they’re frustrated at his naive solution and hurt at what they left behind. This isn’t adding time to THW; this is tweaking phraseology and presenting an event differently.

Change how Berk is abandoned. To make the attack feel more dire, threatening, either: 1. Have the Hooligans more reluctant and grumpy to leave in the town meeting, and not play the leaving scene so lightly, or 2. Have Grimmel chase them out of Berk so they have to flee then and there. This might even reduce time! 

Show Grimmel’s power over dragons. We could have a few-second-long flashback of him standing over a field of dead Night Fury bodies, or have his place cloaked in dragon skins or skulls. 

Show Grimmel’s power as a warlord. Grimmel acts in almost a solo fashion, despite cooperating with warlords and having an army. It doesn’t give us a good sense of scale. Show his interactions better with the whole of his forces to make him feel more dangerous, and for humanity as a whole to feel more like a threat against dragons. For example, in the scenes where he’s trying to trap the dragon riders, show him commanding more people.

Show Grimmel’s impact on the dragon (and/or human worlds) through landscape. What if, as the Hairy Hooligans try to find a new place to stay, they fly over several islands that have been destroyed by Grimmel’s forces? Either human civilizations, or homes once havens to dragons, with characters making comment they “hope” people got away. And what if, when Grimmel takes their dragons near the end of THW, it’s again through more violence and a raid and fire and destruction? 

Conversations more clearly talk about Grimmel’s dangers over dragons and humans, and how he’s one of many people that’ll arise. This idea is embedded in THW dialogue, but not clearly enough to fully grasp its weight, especially not in the sense we see characters grasp this. Have Hiccup and Astrid and Valka or something talk about how widely destructive Grimmel is, how even once he’s gone another man like him will take his place, and that while they may continue to fight and win for human and dragonkind, it’s ultimately not the right move to make for everyone to live safest and alive. A conversation laying this out makes a world of difference in our understanding of what dangers are going down and why we need to come to the solution THW concludes with. Again, this isn’t adding time; it’s changing phraseology. 

Add a few minutes to the climax. Make the final fight with Grimmel obviously the final fight, the threat bigger, the action more intense.

Perhaps show that Berk’s done good work changing the world by their choices. Even though Berk ultimately decides to let the dragons go, they are meant to be the voice of peace that changes their world. The good guys can’t resign to letting themselves live under the thumb of bad guys’ choices. Show that they’ve made a difference - Grimmel and his armies are gone and the world is regrowing (no more torched landscape, if we add that element in) - but that it’s still going to help their world by letting dragons go, too… for this generation, at least.

3. To Make Hiccup and Toothless’ Parting Jive Better

Hiccup and Toothless separate out of need - they can’t live in the same place for the better of both their kinds. However, since the movie spends so much time on Toothless chasing after the Light Fury, we don’t get that full sense of need. I propose:

Open THW with a clear Hicctooth sappy bonding moment. We need things like “Forbidden Friendship” and “Where No One Goes” to feel the power of Hicctooth’s love. Give us that starting sense in THW of how close they are before adding in the complications. It can even be done by tweaking how the opening fight scene goes down.

Show dragons profiting by living with humans, but it also being Complicated with their wild side. We need to acknowledge that the relationship between humans and dragons has done the dragons good, too! Otherwise it might feel incongruous with the rest of the franchise.

Show dragons being unfit in the urban area through their own restlessness. The movie tries to show this with Moosie Boi being too big for Berk, and Berk being so crowded with dragons Gobber finds the soup unsanitary. But if we see Stormfly restless and want to leave for the Hidden World, too, wouldn’t this say something more about where dragons are pulled to and belong?

Less time spent on Toothless investigating the Night Fury. You can’t cut this down too much or we’ll feel like rushing, but since THW focuses so much on just Toothless and the Light Fury’s connection rather than an overarching problem for dragons, it’s hard to feel the full-scale issues of the problem. Making it just him and her feels more like a hook up love story than “dragons and humans are incompatible for their needs.”

Change Toothless’ body language. Show more emotional division in Toothless about his conflicting options. Show him hesitant to leave Hiccup and the two interact over that. Show him lonely away from his kind when with Hooligans. Show him feeling that loneliness met - that deep emotional need of being with his own species - when he’d thought was lost to him (rather than focusing on it being a romantic hookup interest). This doesn’t take more time; it tweaks what was already given on screen.

Change Toothless’ emotions with the Light Fury to feel more like loneliness being met than horny boi practicing kissing with a rock. This does a better job of showing that Toothless has a deep need that needs to be met as a wild animal and as a social draconic species.

Change conversations Hiccup has with humans about Toothless’ struggle. Maybe have Hiccup processing less with people and more by himself or with Toothless. Don’t write the conversations with people be about “Toothless has a girlfriend” and “of course he left.” Discuss instead how Night Furies are social creatures and Toothless hasn’t been with his kind in six years - that’s a huge hole in his heart being filled. Validate the deep connection Hiccup and Toothless have, while simultaneously acknowledging the struggle of this moment now. The movie shows that the Light Fury can never be domesticated, so I think that’s fine, but maybe one line from Astrid saying, “I don’t think she’ll come to live with us,” would be enough to help other audience members pick that up too.

More time spent on all dragons being in danger, and Toothless as an alpha unable to protect them with Hairy Hooligans. The story doesn’t show Toothless being much of an alpha - intentional - until he reaches the Hidden World and it clicks. But I suggest it’d be more effective to pull this out more than having an issue with Moose Boi taking up too much space in Berk, and Berk being so crowded Gobber has a dragon in his soup.

Put more of a deal on Toothless being an alpha. You can say that Toothless didn’t understand or use his role as alpha when with humans, but I think showing more sense of conflict, and of an alpha needing to be wild to protect his own, would be useful. Make this an issue for all dragons. The alpha status being used as a blackmail device against Toothless to keep the Light Fury alive could be replaced with us seeing the full species of dragonkind being unable to be protected by an alpha apart from his own people. More needs to be done than dragons bowing to him in one scene to understand what the alpha does for his society.

Show Toothless with more Light Furies. The Light Fury being his singular focus is great. But what about, in the Hidden World, Hiccup and Astrid watch Toothless interacting with a whole group of Night Furies, and he’s clearly in a situation that was Made For Him?

THW already has great content in there - Toothless and the Light Fury interacting, Hiccup crying when he realizes Toothless is fit in the Hidden World, Hiccup freaking out and Astrid comforting him when he feels a low, and Hiccup and Toothless parting ways touchingly at the end.

With these proposed tweaks, we get Toothless and Hiccup’s relationship being addressed deeply from the angle of both friends. We understand what both Toothless and Hiccup emotionally feel, and palatably sense how both love the other. We get a sense that Toothless is attracted to the Light Fury and might want to mate, but that she’s also calling him into a wild life and reminding him that he’s been alone, separated from his kind. We get a sense that it’s not just Toothless, but all dragons who might be called back to the Hidden World. We get a sense that it’s not just Toothless, but his whole role as alpha affecting the entirety of dragonkind.

And once we add in a greater sense of Grimmel being dangerous, and that more humans like him will continue to rise up, we can understand why Berk would release all their dragons. It’s not that dragons hate living with humans - THW can make that clear - and it’s not that dragons haven’t been profited by living with humans. But in the current call, the current situation, it’s best to go to the Hidden World.

I’m mostly tweaking how scenes go down, changing lines and reactions rather than adding material. Feel free to propose a longer movie! For me, THW already has enough space to share its message. Maybe it needed to be a few minutes longer, but I suppose my own sense is that they had enough time to budget in this material, make a smooth-flowing movie with all the material they needed to present, and come away with an astounding storyline.

Like you, this isn’t meant to judge the movie as bad! It isn’t bad! It’s downright wonderful in many aspects. I’m so happy I’ve seen it and can scream over it! Simply, if I were in charge of tweaking the script, these are the first alterations I’d make, and I think it would make THW even better.

[thegamedevquest]

From Blender to pixel art

Hey guys !

Last time, i mentioned that the first game is a 2D pixel art platformer, but it was really important to me that the animations were smooth and fluid. The usual (and to be honest, best looking) way to achieve this is by having a 2D artist working on tons of frames (the more you want fluid animations at 60 fps, the more frames you need).

Examples from PixelOutput 

The way that i chose, i thought i came up with the ideas myself but it's actually something that has been used many times before in the industry, the most recent example i have in mind being Dead Cells. The idea is to use all the 3D workflow sugar (keyframing, animating, iterating on the mesh without necessarily having to rework the animations, blending between poses or between animations using Mecanim,...), and making it render as pixel art on screen. This article will detail the workflow (actually the main steps of it) i've used to create, animate and render my main character, and i'll be providing very helpful links i've been referring to for most of the steps. Thanks to all of these guys for their great insights.

Step 1 - Create a character MakeHuman is free and very easy to use. I won't elaborate on this, check this tutorial if you need any help.

Step 2 - Customizing the character Once your character is in Blender, you have the opportuniy to customize it as you see fit. Depending on what you want to do, it will require more or less modeling skills. For my game i knew i'd go with the black solid color for characters, so i only needed a silhouette which simplifies a lot this process. I just sculpted a really barebone backpack because i wanted my main character to have one. Remember it will be rendered as pixel art in the end, so no need to be too finicky about the details. You may have noticed that the mesh from MakeHuman has quite a lot of vertices. If you think you may run into performance issues because of that (for instance, if you want to display a large number of characters on screen), you may want to simplify the mesh topology using modifiers or manual retopology. I didn't, my main character appears only once in the game.

Step 3 - Rigging Once you're happy with the mesh, you can rig it. Again this is very standard and straightforward (but not necessarily easy), check this tutorial. For an easier setup, you can also use Rigify (which i did). Get familiar with the rig, but because it's a human character and we will be doing a lot of animations, you absolutely need IK on your rig for arms and legs, or you will quickly feel the urge to kill yourself. Check this out to understand IK and how to set it up in Blender. Feel free to make your rig more personal, it's all about how you will use it to animate. This part is important because you create the tools you'll be using while iterating, so these tools must be as efficient as possible to have you win as much time as possible. For example, i removed a lot of bones that i didn't require because of my art style that will hide details (fingers, toes,..). Make it easy on yourself!

Step 4 - Animation Now that your model is rigged, you can animate it. There is little to know from the technical standpoint (check this tutorial to get you started), but be warned that you will spend A LOT of time on animations. First try to think of the framerate of animations that you'll be using in-game (configured in Unity) so you use the same in Blender. Then for each animation, i usually follow these steps : - If possible, study the movement you want to make by watching videos in slow motion on youtube or whatever. - Think about how you'll use the animation in game. For a 2D platformer, you only need the animation to look good from one side. So put your animation view to the side and work from there. It doesn't matter if the limbs are all wrong when looking the animation from the face: The player will never see that. - Time the animation by doing a rough keyframing of the "big movements" of your animation (ie left foot/right foot for a walk cycle) - If i'm doing a cycle animation, i'll duplicate the first frame to the frame "last+1" (if your animation is 50 frames long, duplicate frame 1 in frame 51). This is so interpolation will make your cycle loop perfectly. - Iterate to improve on these keyframes until you're happy with the overall movement. - Begin to add smaller details (think, sub-animations) and iterate on them. - Remember to focus your efforts on what really matters: Spend more time on the animations you'll be seeing most often. Walk and run cycles are very important for instance, you'll be doing that the whole time in-game.

My animations honestly don't look very good, even from the side, but once they are displayed as pixel art and blended with Mecanim, i think the result is good enough, and fits my expectations of fluidity and smmoothness. That's one way of getting around a weakness (ie. my inability to animate properly a human character) to not let it hurt the game idea you have in mind.

Step 5 - From Blender to Unity To export from Blender to Unity is a simple process, but it raise a few issues regarding scaling, rotation, export and import settings,... I've solved all of them using the settings described in this link, but please keep in mind it might change depending on versions of both Blender and Unity.

Step 6 - Setting up the in-game character Having your model show and animate in Unity is usually as simple as a drag and drop. In my case, since i'm doing a 2D game with 3D models, i had to make a prefab that would just add a 2d collider, and set the Z position so the model is displayed above all the sprites (which have Z == 0). Since the camera is orthographic, the bigger scale of the character because of its proximity with the camera won't be an issue.

Step 7 - Render as pixel art Unity now provides some tools to render your game with a pixel-perfect camera. This article from Unity explains it very well. You can also set a custom resolution for your game view that matches your render resolution, so you have a good preview even when the game is not running which is very helpful for designing UI or using Unity animation sequence tool.

Step 8 - Mecanim I'll skip this step as it's very dependant on the game. For a very simple Mecanim example of a 2D character playing a run animation when moving, check this tutorial. The advantage of using 3d models and animations is that Mecanim will be able to blend bone positions between animations, allowing for smoother transitions. Be careful to keep the Animator clean (These are good tips), as things can quickly go out of control in Mecanim. This is my complete Animator for Skyline Rider :

Step 9+ - Iterating Now that everything is setup, you can start iterating. Try out your game, see how your animation feels, go to Blender to make a few tweaks, then export to fbx again and continue testing. Most of the time you can even remain in play mode and the animation will be updated without the need to restart the game. I think of it as "gameplay driven" design which is only possible with great workflows. If you had to redraw every frame when you want to tweak an animation or the looks of a character, you waste a lot of time and either the budget explodes and the release date is pushed away, or you end up with "animation driven" design where programmers will need to make gameplay fit animation, and my personal opinion is that it can hurt the feeling of the game, which must always remain the top priority (at least, in the kind of game i like). This will probably be less and less of an issue with the continuous progress of procedural animation and animation rigging. Looking forward to working on things like that !

Obviously this whole 2D/3D is kind of a workaround, so in the next article i'll mention something that was actually made less convenient because of this.

Thanks for reading!

If you have questions or want to know more about this workflow, feel free to contact me (check the first post for contact information).