Hello.
My name is Dan, I’m an animator and this is New Frame Plus.
I want to focus on another single animation today.
This one was requested by Atle Hillmann,
who recommended we have a look at the mining animation in Skyrim.
So! Let's see it...
Ok, so let’s walk through what’s happening here...
If you walk up to an ore vein and press the interact button, the camera will instantly
switch to a third person angle (or a slightly different third person angle
if you were in third person already).
The animation seems to prefer that your character be positioned in a specific spot,
so your character may also warp to a new position over that camera cut.
Now, if you approached that ore vein with your weapon still equipped,
that warp won’t happen until after your character puts the weapon away,
so you’ll actually see them unequip the weapon in third person
and THEN see him warp to that new position.
In either case, your character will go to a neutral idle position.
Then your pickaxe will spawn in your character’s hand
and they will begin to play the mining animation.
This loop will play for 10-15 seconds until the ore vein is depleted,
and then your character will transition back to their neutral idle position,
the pickaxe will despawn and the camera will return to where it began,
either your preferred third person or first person view.
Now, this animation was requested with the assertion that:
And... yeah, it’s not great.
I have some guesses as to why it turned out this way,
but first let’s just dig into what’s NOT working here...
To start, the animation on the character - the pickaxe swinging action itself -
feels kind of mechanical.
The force of a pickaxe swing should start in the body,
you should see the power happening in the hips and torso,
carrying up through the arms and transferring to the axe’s swinging arc.
But when you look at each of these swings, the torso bend and the axe-swinging motion both start
and end at almost exactly the same time,
all the parts of the body just mechanically moving at once
like an animatronic or something.
And on top of that, the entire motion just feels weirdly SOFT.
Like, people hit Whack-a-Mole cabinets with more force than this.
When the axe connects with the rock, it barely even feels like it’s hitting something.
This doesn’t really feel like a miner we’re watching...
it feels like we’re watching a film extra who was told:
"Ok, act like you’re mining, but please PLEASE don’t actually hit any of the walls.
this whole place is styrofoam, floor to ceiling.”
[Director Voice]: "Alright, action!"
[Director Voice]: "Perfect. Cut!"
Now, one big caveat worth mentioning is:
it is possible that this is modelled after some
actual pickaxe mining technique that I just don’t know about.
I mean, it doesn’t match any of the pickaxe mining reference I’ve been able to find,
but I’ll be the first to admit: I am no expert on pickaxe use.
But even so, even if what we’re seeing here IS an authentic representation of legit ore-mining
pickaxe technique, if that authentic detail LOOKS and FEELS incorrect
to your average player, that is still arguably a problem...
It very much depends on the type of experience your game is going for, of course, but
if 90% of players are going to look at your animation and mistake that authentic detail for BAD animation...
it’s at least worth considering what sorts of adjustments you can make so that
the authentic detail feels more correct to your audience.
Still, even if the animation on the character had been totally fine,
we would still have some significant jank to deal with here.
Because a lot of what makes this mining action in Skyrim feel so rough isn’t even the animation itself,
but the way that animation has been implemented.
Everything that happens from the moment you hit the interact button
to the moment your character starts swinging the pickaxe just feels BAD.
For one, having your camera suddenly cut to third person like this is really jarring.
You go from BEING your character to-
GAH
...suddenly WATCHING yourself doing something,
like you were kicked out of your own body and are now a ghost having to
spend fifteen seconds watching yourself not know how to use a pickaxe.
And maybe the camera cut wouldn’t be SO bad if it weren’t for the fact that your
CHARACTER changes position over that cut too
(I assume so that they can line up with the invisible task point in front of that ore).
Having a simultaneous camera cut AND positional change just feels really disorienting.
Worse still is your character’s transition into the mining animation.
Not only do they pop to a new location
(and then spend the next 20 frames unnaturally
sliiiiding forward a little further to get completely into position),
but they spend 15 of those first 20 frames frozen like a mannequin.
They’re basically locked in this pose for a quarter of a second
before they even START to play the animation.
And when they DO start moving, they spend another 30-40 frames mechanically blending
into this “pickaxe-holding” pose before they even start lining up their first swing.
There’s nearly a full second of awkward, robotic transitioning into the mining animation here
(and even MORE if your character has to finish putting their weapon away first)
and it is just not doing the presentation of this any favors.
Even if you don’t actively notice any of these individual problems in the moment,
they all add up in that first second to make the whole thing subconsciously feel
really awkward somehow.
And the end of the mining animation does the same thing:
The pickaxe despawns right out of your character’s hands before they spend MORE THAN A SECOND
robotically blending back to that neutral idle pose.
And THEN [shwoop] they finally put your ghost back in your body.
Honestly, I’d say the jank in these transitions is an even bigger problem
than the mining animation itself.
Overall, it just leaves the Skyrim mining experience feeling extremely unpolished.
So now that we know exactly WHAT isn’t working, the next question is:
WHY would it be like this?
What could have led to it turning out this way?
Of course, the simplest answer (and the one most people probably jump to)
is that maybe the people involved were just bad at their jobs.
And that’s always possible!
But just as often, I see lackluster or janky-looking work coming from incredibly-skilled people who
ran into some sort of roadblock.
Maybe a time constraint, a technical constraint or some design limitation.
Maybe the mining feature was just waaaaay far down the priority list
on an already over-booked animation schedule.
Maybe they originally WANTED to make first person versions of ALL of these task animations
so you wouldn’t have to experience a camera change,
but then there just wasn’t time in the schedule to make
TWO versions of every task animation in the game.
Who knows, maybe at one point mining wasn’t even planned to be a feature.
But then it got added to the game late in development
and didn’t get the polish time it needed.
Or MAYBE (and this one is a reach), but...
maybe at one point, mining or other task animations
like cooking or wood chopping weren’t intended to be things the PLAYER could do!
Maybe they were originally meant to be used exclusively by NPCs out in the game world,
just to make the place feel more lived in.
I can almost picture this being true just because of how many of these task animations
look like they were designed to be unintrusive background noise.
But then some developer had the idea to let players use that NPC task system
to make stuff like alchemy and blacksmithing look cooler.
And yeah, brute forcing the player camera and animation system into an NPC task system
that was never meant to accommodate this did result in a bunch of weird hitches,
but everybody agreed that the jank was worth it.
I could throw darts at this board all day, but you get the idea.
And I wasn’t there, so I have got no idea what constraints these folks were working under, BUT...
none of that really changes the fact that this mining animation turned out rough.
But let’s assume for a moment that it was our job to FIX this.
How might we go about making this animation look better?
Well, I would start by polishing up that pickaxe-swinging animation.
Really get in there, loosen it up and try to make things feel less robotic.
And put some more power into that swing!
Have them raise the axe higher before bringing it down,
bring that right hand further down the grip as they raise it
play with the spacing on the axe swing itself
so you really feel some acceleration as it drops.
Of course, if we’d rather stay true to the more contained style of swinging that
Skyrim already has and not replace it with a full blown wood-chopping axe swing,
I can work with that.
The character doesn’t have to put their whole body into it,
but I’ve still gotta see some more OOMPH.
This character’s trying to break through solid rock here.
Let’s see that pickaxe bounce off the stone when it hits.
Maybe sometimes it get wedged into the rock so solidly that the character
has to stop and pry it loose.
I mean, if we’re going to make the player sit and watch this happen for 10-15 seconds,
we might as well throw in some interesting variations to the swing
rather than having the character do what feels like the exact same swing on loop.
Or, even better, let’s add a proper first person version of this pickaxe animation!
Now, I didn’t mention it before, but it turns out you actually CAN
mine in first person in Skyrim.
All you have to do is - instead of approaching the ore and pressing the Interact button -
equip your pickaxe in your hand and attack the ore with it like you would swing a sword.
I mean, this is definitely not how you properly swing a pickaxe either,
but it does at least look and feel a lot better as an experience.
And hey, as long as we’re dreaming up waysto improve things,
why not make THIS look better!
What if there was a custom first person pickaxe swing
instead of just this default one-handed attack animation?
And we could change it so that all you have to do is Interact with the ore in first person
and your character automatically equips the pickaxe and starts swinging!
I mean, why make the player do the busy work of digging into their inventory
and equipping the pickaxe first?
Or say we WANT to keep the third person view for mining...
maybe we want to keep it consistent with the other random tasks you can do in this game.
Well in that case, we could at the very least try to polish up
the transition into the mining animation.
Maybe instead of a jarring camera cut,
we could have the camera pull back,
do more of a zoom to that new angle?
Or we could keep the cut and just trim out that sluggish, second-long robotic start and
stop animation on either end.
Maybe when you hit the Interact button, your character could start raising the pickaxe
in first person, and then we’d cut to them winding up for a swing in third person?
That way it could at least feel like there’s a single consistent action
happening on either side of the camera cut.
There are all kinds of potential ways you could go about
trying to make this animation look better.
Of course, all of the ideas I just pitched assume we’re looking at a development environment
free of technical or scheduling constraints, which…
...yeah, that rarely happens.
There are almost certainly a PLETHORA of reasons why these fixes I just rattled off
wouldn’t have been feasible solutions.
Maybe tampering with the camera behavior to fix THIS feature
would break the camera for a dozen other features that rely on the same system.
Maybe engineering it so that your character can auto-equip a pickaxe
for easier first-person mining would require a week of coding time
that the programming team just could not spare.
Or maybe you just don’t have any room in the schedule for additional animation work.
So it goes.
Again: actually doing the work to make this stuff function and look good
in a real video game is infinitely harder than picking it apart for other people’s amusement
(which is what I just did)
So no disrespect whatsoever intended toward the people who
worked on this mining feature originally.
They certainly wouldn’t be the first developers to experience the frustration of having a
feature or animation not turn out exactly how they’d hoped.
I've been there too. Trust me.
I do hope this has been at least a little educational, though!
Thanks again to Atle for the request!
If you’ve got a particular animation from a game that you’d like me to talk about,
free to request it in the comments.
And subscribe if you want to see more game animation videos like this one.
I’ll see ya next time!