'Cyberpunk 2077' Devs Discuss Revamped Animation Style

Earlier this week we shared our first look at Cyberpunk 2077 on the November cover of Edge [...]

Earlier this week we shared our first look at Cyberpunk 2077 on the November cover of Edge Magazine, now we're getting some of the juicy details for the game's big feature.

One aspect that blew fans away regarding the big Cyberpunk reveal during this year's E3 was the amazing animations that could be seen in the trailer. Since then, the world got just under 50 minutes of real-time gameplay to soak in and with it the title's incredible animation style.

Lead Cinematics Animator Maciej Pietras opened up a little bit about what went into their system since its The Witcher overhaul. Pietras revealed, "We have a completely new animation system, and we completely changed the approach to handling animations. We have a better mo-cap studio, we have a completely new facial animation system based on muscles."

We have a new way of generating lip sync animation when people are talking. We have a completely new approach to creating environments, so instead of working on a huge world at once we are creating prefabs which are then adjusted and placed differently, so everything is scalable. Another thing is simply our engine, which we decided to push far while still working hard on optimisation to make sure the game will run on current-gen consoles. It's a completely new way – I would say almost every single department went through this kind of evolution."

The animation team absolutely had a big job to do, but as mentioned earlier this year from CD's Patrick Mills - the beauty is in the teamwork. In a recent interview with Metro, Mills stated "We've taken something where everyone looks around and you can see the issues. And you might have different perspectives on them, and even within our development team, the game is being made by huge numbers of people with very different opinions. I have co-workers – colleagues, good friends – that I disagree with very, very strongly, and they very strongly disagree with me."

He added, "And all of us are making this together. It's very likely that when you play this game, just like Witcher 3… there are contradictions in Witcher 3. There's scenes that say one thing and there's scenes that say something else. And they may be a contradiction, but that's great, that's wonderful. These are not just mass market consumer goods, they are also these collaborative… god, this sounds pretentious, but they're collaborative art pieces at the same time. Just like movies, just like television. I like to think so."

Unfortunately we still don't have a release date at this time but you can check out Edge Magazine right here!

0comments