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Developers, please let your characters actually sleep under the blanket in games

Dremorak

Dremorak

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,787
New Zealand
Currently working on a game where our characters make beds, get in and out of them etc.
We try to obscure it as little as possible (along with every other interaction in the game)
So you can see them unfold sheets, adjust them on the bed, and then when characters sleep in the bed they lift the sheet and slide under

We have been working on characters changing clothes this month actually, and I had a crazy idea for how we could do it.... the problem is we have 100s of characters and multiple character body types it would need to work for and it ended up getting shelved. We have now decided to go with a model swap in the middle of a changing animation, which is the standard video game way to do it :D Every other interaction we have tried to make as physically accurate as possible, which is a challenge when I'm the only Animator/Tech Animator on the team!

Maybe closer to release I'll update this thread with some gifs!
 
Swift_Gamer

Swift_Gamer

Banned
Dec 14, 2018
3,701
Rio de Janeiro
Tahnit said:
FF3 did this in a brilliant way. They set the bottom half of the bed to cut away at the characters sprite so it looks like the character is laying down on the pillow under the covers. Its so smart.

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All sprite based jrpgs since the 8bit era did this.
 
Leeness

Leeness

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,943
I know most dislike them, but Heavy Rain, Beyond, and Detroit all had characters under bed spreads (Beyond even had ~tossing and turning button prompts).

Failing at finding gifs though.
 
SnazzyNaz

SnazzyNaz

The Wise Ones
Member
Nov 11, 2019
1,883
Jawmuncher said:
EHb-TawX4AEc0nZ.jpg:large


While characters sleeping in beds was common the in 8 & 16 bit era, after that time the practice of animating a blanket and having the character actually sleep underneath became a lost art. Even some of the biggest AAA games with budgets the same as a small country stay away from this complex task.

I understand why on paper. It's 10x easier to just slap your model on a bed in their default gear for what will ultimately be a 5 swc transition scene as they never go to sleep again. But the act of seeing a character actually under the covers has elevated numerous titles to GOTY status.

We have accounts for stuff like "Can you pet the dog" when in reality this is a 10x more important and relevant matter.

Because of this, I'd love if the community could post some games in recent years that weren't scared to go above and beyond so we can celebrate them and their sacrifice to true art.
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I deadass opened this thread just to post Agent York under the covers, well done.
 
Anustart

Anustart

9 Million Scovilles
Avenger
Nov 12, 2017
9,101
Next were gonna be demanding proper hammock physics, then wanting the next gen additional cpu power to go to proper npc bed time ai. No thanks!
 

ymgve

Member
Oct 31, 2017
549
Crossing Eden said:
It's still incredibly impressive bit of animation. Look at how she briefly attempts to grab the shirt, misses, before catching a grip. While another character grabs it too. That shot is insanely hard to animate in a convincing way. And the game is full of other scenes where characters interact with clothing just as convincingly. So much that it doesn't even register that it's an incredibly rare thing to see in video games.
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And this is way beyond the effort of cutscene animation in other AAA games. You can probably find a dozen examples of games released last year that still do the "guy gets stabbed with sword held by another person, but the weapon animation is only linked to one character so it moves around like a cheap theater prop"
 

OutToLunch

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
105
Spork4000 said:
From the little I know about 3D animation. Sounds pretty hard
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don't worry OP doesn't seem to know either. To claim that developers are 'scared' is insulting. I woke on a game with a ton cloth and hair sim- unfortunately not done as well as it should be - but it's really about balancing resources and finding the time relative to everything else that needs to be done.Im certain any team could pull off this miraculous feat but ultimately it wouldn't be worth the cost.
 
Leeway

Leeway

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,420
Vancouver, BC
Considering the resources and difficulties, it's probably not worth the effort unless showing it is somehow an important plot point or mechanic to the game. Speaking mostly from personal experiences and pains in animation.

If an animation team actually get a proper nights sleep at home under their own real life blankets rather than burn themselves out to make this happen, I think I'd actually much prefer that to be quite honest.

Edit: I will say, starting this thread with Deadly Premonition was *chefs kiss* Started the show with a show stopper.

Also I have and always will find 8/16-bit characters rolling in and out of bed to be incredibly charming.
 
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Jay_AD

Jay_AD

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,916
Lord Error said:
What possible purpose could something like that have during gameplay to be so desirable that everyone would be attempting to do it? No, I'm sure he meant it as in "with realtime graphics", as it's just incredibly difficult to do that with realtime graphics. And they indeed finally managed to do it in TLOU2, after probably hundreds of games where something like that was always done off-camera.
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Although I think it's not like nobody has figured out how to technically do it, rather that it's more a "willingness to throw massive amounts of man-hours at it" kind of thing.

For a lot of developers that don't have the full brunt of "biggest prestige object of largest platform holder" behind them, that is a trade-off not worth making most of the time.
 
A1an

A1an

Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,341
UK
In ACNH your Mii breaths in the game and also when they lay on the bed although they lay atop of the blankets you can see their torso going up and down as they breathe.
 
Nikus

Nikus

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
10,442
I've been playing Kingdom Hearts recently and Sora keeps his big ass shoes on his bed

But real talk it must be super hard to do something that seems simple, and I understand that the benefit isn't big enough for the devs
Maybe with the new game engines, we'll see

It's kinda like characters who can't put their hands in their pockets you know
It was really jarring around the time of GTA 4 when characters would talk and move with their hands as far away from their bodies as possible so their hands wouldn't clip in their clothes
Once you notice it you can't unsee it
 
ManNR

ManNR

Member
Feb 13, 2019
2,999
The lesson I've learned from this thread is that I will never invite Squeenix over to sleep in my guest room.
 
Dremorak

Dremorak

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,787
New Zealand
In the game I'm working on at the moment we have characters able to get into beds and under sheets. Our low poly art style helps a lot, but I basically ended up rigging the bed sheet as our beds can get the sheets taken off and washed and then put back on the bed and even though our art style is low poly our animation style is semi realistic. So they fold and unfold the sheets, make the beds, characters get into the beds etc. I know there's a thing against self promotion in here so I won't say what the game is called (and TBH we're not yet in a state to have that many eyes on it anyway) but maybe when the game comes out I'll drop a small something in this thread to finally show what it looks like when characters go under a sheet in a game lol.
 
werezompire

werezompire

Zeboyd Games
Verified
Oct 26, 2017
11,585
I don't have a link on hand, but we did a custom bed/awake transition animation for the main character in Cosmic Star Heroine.
 
Sesha

Sesha

â–˛ Legend â–˛
Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,864
Capcom will demonstrate their mastery of complex blanket interaction in Dino Crisis 4. Truly then will Capcom be back.
 
Multiverse Moo

Multiverse Moo

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,441
Silicon Valley
Jawmuncher said:
Has there been any updates on this or are we still dealing with either Sprites or on top of beds?
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We actually had a back and forth about how to tackle Noguchi sleeping in the temple scene, because I had drawn some concept art for different "cyberpunk sleeping bags" and the biggest concern was being able to animate someone under a material.

Yeah, it's not a game but it's still a real-time cinematic made in Dreams and we don't get fancy things like cloth simulations to help us deal with how it moves when a person is under the covered part and spins around in it, or is sat up with his legs under it. Thankfully our animator, Byvsen, knocked it out of the park.

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You can see the full scene here (timestamp is for 5 min 54 sec):

 
OP
OP
Jawmuncher

Jawmuncher

Crisis Dino
Moderator
Oct 25, 2017
38,845
Ibis Island
Thorn said:
It's extremely difficult to do for little pay off.
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I feel like that shirt pull in TLOU2 was more difficult and had the same amount of pay off
Multiverse Moo said:
We actually had a back and forth about how to tackle Noguchi sleeping in the temple scene, because I had drawn some concept art for different "cyberpunk sleeping bags" and the biggest concern was being able to animate someone under a material.

Yeah, it's not a game but it's still a real-time cinematic made in Dreams and we don't get fancy things like cloth simulations to help us deal with how it moves when a person is under the covered part and spins around in it, or is sat up with his legs under it. Thankfully our animator, Byvsen, knocked it out of the park.

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You can see the full scene here (timestamp is for 5 min 54 sec):

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Oh that's dope! Thank you for sharing.
 
Multiverse Moo

Multiverse Moo

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,441
Silicon Valley
Kcannon said:
Cloth physics are superhard to animate. Not worth the effort most of the time.
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I feel like with reinforced training via AI that this is getting easier to emulate without realtime physics. Stuff like animation blending of bipedal humans is starting to extend to their clothing.

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to extend this concept to stuff like animating cloth for when characters sleep in a bed, or cozy up on a couch, next to a campfire, etc.

EDIT - In fact, I hope to see studios like Naughty Dog pave the way to make it easier for their artists to have things like this more often, as well as companies that offer solutions for Unity and Unreal.
 
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