LogInIf it ain't broken, don't fix it.
As years go by, developers of our beloved game engines and 3D art applications continuously expand the possibilities of their programs, regularly adding brand-new rendering, lighting, animation, modeling, and other features in an effort to improve the lives of their userbase and expand said userbase by offering tools their competitors might not have.
Despite that, many AAA developers understandably prefer to stick to their guns and use the same tools year after year, showing us with their actions that sometimes, if something isn't broken, it doesn't need any fixes even many years later.
FromSoftware
One such developer is the renowned Japanese studio FromSoftware, which, as it turns out, used the same tools to rig character animations in both Dark Souls III, released in 2016, and Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, shipped in 2023, seven years after DS3. According to CGWORLD's interview with Armored Core VI's developers, brought to our attention by an experienced Animator and author of Game Anim: Video Game Animation Explained, Jonathan Cooper, the 2023 game's mechas were rigged using Autodesk 3ds Max's Biped, even those whose models don't resemble humanoids in the slightest.
"Bipeds have the advantages of being highly stable and easy to transfer motions to, and as they have been used in past titles such as Elden Ring, they have the advantage of being easy to repurpose in-house know-how," the devs said in the interview. "In this game, model data is prepared for each series of player units and a Biped is created to match the silhouette. This is where the designer's work ends, and after that, the skeleton data for each part, such as the head and core, used in the game is split and output using a tool, and the skeletons of each part are synthesized on the game side."
FromSoftware
FromSoftware
The biped skeleton includes these properties, designed to help you animate more quickly and accurately:
- Joints on the biped are hinged to follow human anatomy. By default, the biped resembles a human skeleton and has a stable inverse-kinematics hierarchy.
- The biped skeleton can easily be made to work with a four-legged creature or an animal that naturally leans forward.
- Natural rotations: When you rotate the biped spine, the arms maintain their relative angle to the ground, rather than behaving as though fused to the shoulders.
- The biped skeleton is specially designed to animate with character studio footsteps, which helps solve the common animation problem of locking the feet to the ground.
FromSoftware
As noted by Cooper, besides Elden Ring mentioned in the original article, 3ds Max's Biped was also used for Dark Souls III and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice:
We highly encourage you to go through the original interview to learn more about the development workflows behind Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon.
Speaking about developers sticking to their guns, earlier this year, it was discovered that one of 2024's most celebrated video games, Helldivers II, is powered by Bitsquid, an archaic engine that you can't access anymore. Known in its later years as Autodesk Stingray, the engine was used to create the original Helldivers and because of that was chosen by Arrowhead for the sequel.
In 2018, however, Stingray was declared dead by its developers, prompting Arrowhead to take matters into their own hands and enhance the software themselves, molding it into the tool they needed instead of abandoning their progress. You can read the full story by clicking this link.
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