Thread by @Widunder

Wanted to share some tidbits of the anim/dev-process for Ramattra, now that he has been announced and shown to the world! Lots of talented people were involved in his development, I had the pleasure of working on his First Person Set #Overwatch #animation #gamedev 🧵1/18

One of the challenges with him is that he's basically two characters in one due to his shapeshifting abilities. It was decided early on that each "form" had to be very different from each other to have the desired impact. Hopefully that comes through when playing him. 🧵 2/18

As you can see in the clip above, each "form" has its own full set of animations for one normal character. It was a blast working out where we could push the differences and extreme between the forms, but it obviously added a lot to his dev- and iteration time. 🧵3/18

I wasn't alone in making the first person animations. A fantastic animator and dev, Matt Lawrence, came to my aid when time was short and helped me with the Nemesis Block ability, Ravenous Vortex ability and the Transform ability. 🧵4/18

The staff was core to his concept from the start. The fire mode/rate was decided upon quite early, but a lot of time was spent on trying different shapes on the screen and how you would aim and shoot with it since "shooting with a staff" felt quite odd initially🧵5/18

We bounced around a lot of mockups between animation, modeling and concept to try to find readable shapes that made sense. The desire to have the staff upright was strong early on. It fits the character and we wanted to avoid it feeling like Mercy's staff. 🧵6/18

High priorities for me was when setting the poses and behavior for the staff was to make sure it felt powerful and in control when in idle and that it felt good to aim as a weapon when firing. 🧵7/18

In these images I've tried to illustrate some of the shapes I was chasing to make sure the weapon felt natural and appealing in first person. Huge props to the dev team for iterating a ton together to find the sweet spot for this strange weapon. 🧵8/18

This was the first time a weapon was high above the crosshair in idle, but still behaved like a normal weapon when firing. Eventually we got used to the idea as we kept tweaking it, hopefully people enjoy it and I look forward to see people's reactions to it. 🧵9/18

You can see the entire firing animation flow in this video. Other fun tidbits of things we added was that the left hand turns based upon how much ammo you have in your "clip". The nanites around the orb also disappear as you spend ammo. 🧵10/18

The left hand as you fire is two poses that goes from A to B based on a curve assigned a variable that tracks your ammo left in your clip. On top of that I added a looping shake animation that becomes more violent the less ammo you have. 🧵11/18

As his firing behavior goes between two different states, there are a lot of smaller transition animation happening. Such as Fire start from complete idle, a punchy fire start from within the fire state, as well as transitions back from firing if you wait long enough. 🧵12/18

Regarding the staff orb nanites, all I'm doing there is blending between a few of poses with a different amount of nanites visible based upon different ammo left-thresholds in your clip. When reloading, they all go back to the first pose again with all of them visible. 🧵13/18

The orb itself is barely animated at all, other than translation for some animations. The rotation is 100% procedural, I applied rotation speeds on multiple axes depending on the state of the player. Idle, firing, reloading, placing shield.🧵13/18

The reason for doing it procedurally is to avoid blend issues and/or lack of continuity between animations when something spins at different rates. This setup allows the orb to just keep going regardless of what it was doing previously. 🧵14/18

The bigger Nemesis form was a lot of fun to figure out, mostly because of how aggressive and punchy we wanted it to feel. As the community has pointed out, I took a lot of inspiration from Zenyatta's firing since the character's are somewhat connected in the lore. 🧵15/18

There are 4 punch variations in a set sequence for variety. It felt important to have all of them clearly go towards the crosshair cleanly to make aiming easier and satisfying. Time was also spent on making the hands feel large on screen but not take too much screen space.🧵16/18

It was a fun challenge to make enough variety, keep it readable, understandable yet super-punchy. Adding shake and scaling things for punchy effect is also one of my favorite things to do. Frame step through one of them to see stuff like these images (watch the arm shape) 🧵17/18

That's all of now! Thank you to the Overwatch team for letting me work on this beast! Tons of people were involved in making him happen and everyone pulled their weight. Hope you enjoy playing him when he's out on Dec 6th! 🧵18/18