Why Skyrim's Mining Animation Is Bad

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!