Q&A with Abdullah Nakipoğlu
Animations are a big part of video games, apart from the obvious reason (a totally still game wouldn’t be much fun, would it?), because they actually have a deep impact on gameplay. If animating a movie is hard work, just imagine animating something that will change and evolve depending on players’ input! Animations give you the visual cues you need to react to what’s happening on screen, especially in combat, so they need to feel natural and realistic. But at the same time, as a player you want to retain control over what’s going on, so animations need to be short and always keep the ability to change on the fly. Then you’ve got all the technical challenges related to motion capture – and that’s not counting animating animals such as dogs or birds, where MoCap is out of the question. This week we talk with one of our character animators, Abdullah Nakipoğlu, who will give us a sneak peek at the complex process of animating characters in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.
