When it comes to the world of video games, there really is no place like home, and for a lot of us, home is Destiny 2. There is just something so special about being a Guardian, fighting alongside others to save the world, earning awesome loot, and celebrating together. That last point—the celebration—is something that really sets Destiny 2 apart from a lot of other games. I mean, have you seen any of the impromptu Tower dance parties?
Today we are chatting with one of our VFX (Visual Effects) artists and an animator, two people on a team of many that all work together to bring you the fun emotes and finishers found within Destiny 2.
Ben: Hi, I'm Ben Platnick, and I use he/him pronouns. I'm a VFX artist here at Bungie. I primarily work on player rewards, so that's everything from ships, Sparrows, transmats, emotes, finishers, armor, weapons, you name it. If it needs sparkles, and is earnable or purchasable with Silver or Bright Dust, I put the sparkles on it.Jonathan: Hi, I'm Jonathan Lester. He/him. I'm the animation outsourcing specialist, which is a fancy way of saying I'm the animator for all the emotes.
Before we get into the icing on the cake, let’s start with a question: Where do emotes come from?
Emotes, hot out of the oven!
The process of conceptualizing any one asset as a reward is a multi-team effort. From the moment something is selected to be added into the game, you can count on that taking just about nine months.
With that in mind, animation is a very tedious and time-intensive craft. Traditionally, if an artist wanted to animate a character, they would create the action one pose at a time – stringing each pose together to create movement. This is referred to as “frame-by-frame”, “by hand”, or “hand-keyed.” All phrases that mean the same thing: animation is not a fast process.
To keep the animation department moving (haha!) at the pace needed, we use motion capture (aka “mocap”) as our primary tool to gather a baseline of animation to data to begin our work. Our mocap performers get the actions requested, then our animators manipulate that data, build upon it, rework it, and ultimately shape it into the emote. That is a dramatically abridged summary of what Jonathan does for emotes, but the idea should be clear enough.
Ben: It’s a team effort for sure. Along with Jonathan and the wonderful folks in Art Direction and Commerce, we get together to pool our ideas, make sure that we can reasonably create the emote and that there aren’t any restraints (time, technical, or legal), and compile a list to let Jonathan and his team of vendors do all the animation work we need. Then it’s on me to put the sparkles on it.Jonathan: Our team starts off with a list of about twenty to thirty different ideas of emotes for the Season. From there, we iterate for a week or two to figure out what works, and what doesn't.After that list has been approved, I start finding and capturing the visual references to be used for the emote. That can be as simple as a broom and trash can lid as a sword and shield, or even someone flailing about on a couch for a multiplayer emote. From there, we either get mocap data or hand-key animation—that depends on what the time frame is.Once that's complete, I'll go in there and adjust the data, make sure the poses are correct, make sure the timing and spacing look good, and everything works. And then once it’s nice and shiny, I ship it over to Ben and he works his magic.
The One About Orbs and Cake
The fact that you can really dive into your art and be proud of the things you make shows in the result for sure. So, when our developers are designing, creating, or even adapting memes into emotes in the game, what does that look like and how long does it take to get it out to players from the initial concept?
Ben: Yeah, it's challenging to figure out what content we can reliably ship nine months later, in a way where players are still able to recognize and laugh at it and want to add it to their collections.The Ponder the Orb emote was a great example because that's always going to be an evergreen meme.
The source material was great because you had a lot of very simple props that you could build out. Something that we run into often in VFX is that we can't make elaborate sequences or elaborate props because we have a certain amount of memory and technical limitations that we must be aware of. And so, Ponder the Orb is a great example of something that we could do in time because really, it's a chair, a pedestal, and a sphere with some magical sparkles that I could add in.
Jonathan: Another thing to consider is that you don't have to come up with a completely unique idea every time. Take Looney Tunes for example—the animators take an idea that has been done 100 times but put a different spin on it. So, when you look at this Ponder the Orb meme, we had a lot of different takes from motion capture where the actor was leaning in, doing this fortune-teller hand wave thing or leaning in and tapping the sphere as if he was trying to change the TV channel. There's so many things you can do with just one emote and still stay true to the original reference. It’s tricky, but also really fun to find that ideal balance between how far you can push the emote envelope while keeping the source material clearly identifiable.Ben: Animation and VFX are like two groups baking a cake. Animation mixes the ingredients and bakes it. Then VFX is free to decorate that cake a million and two different ways which sometimes results in the emote looking entirely different than the animator originally intended, but we work together and allow that creativity to blossom into what we share with the players every Season. From the first email to the final product, getting to work back and forth with Jonathan, our art directors, and a whole bunch of other people to figure out exactly how we're going to shape the final animation is always a super fun time.
But What If We Put a Chicken on It?
It is really fascinating to watch one idea change and develop into something completely different, but it still captures the energy that was originally intended. Another fun example of how these two working together creates magical chaos would have to be the Swab the Deck emote from Season of Plunder. So how does this process look?
Jonathan: That was the very first one I ever got to work on that was shipped in game! I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I had just gone through training, but it came out nicely!Ben: It's a really good emote.Jonathan: Oh my gosh thank you—I was sweating about that so much. Because for me, as an artist, I’m overanalyzing every little thing, right? Making sure the players want to use it, making sure I'm satisfied with it, and as an artist you're never satisfied with your work. You just have to nod your head and say, “all right, this is in a pretty good spot” and move on. And for the Swab the Deck emote, I felt it wasn’t even at that “good enough” stage. It was really a struggle! But Ben and I put our heads together about the props and emotionality it needed, and when I passed the emote off to Ben, he delivered! He had this sloshing water thing going on, and you put, what? A rooster or something on the shoulder?Ben: It was a chicken. I realized we didn't have a parrot model, and at that point in development it was way too late to model a parrot specifically for this. Later, I was talking with a bunch of coworkers, and they were like, “Hey, what if we just put a chicken on the shoulder?” We all had a laugh and I was like, “No, seriously, what if we put a chicken on the shoulder? We have the Colonel!” For those who don’t know, the Colonel is a chicken already in the game. So that's what ended up shipping, and now we have Colonel representation in the Swab the Deck emote and the Poultry Petting emote. 😊Jonathan: That was the perfect example of, “Oh my gosh, we make a great team.” That was awesome.
It’s not all “parrots are also chickens” though, we also have to be aware of what we are really creating when we build a new emote.
Jonathan: One of the biggest limitations we really have within designing things like emotes is making sure they fit within the games parameters while making sure it can't be misused at the same time. Something might start with the question, “Why don’t we have an emote where I lie down to take a nap?” And as an emote in the Tower, that idea could work. But if you're in PvP with someone in your sights who uses the emote to lie flat, they’re now using an unintended tool to literally dodge bullets with the press of a button. That's one of the things we're trying to avoid.Ben: We also can’t move the players outside of their starting point past a certain distance currently, otherwise Bad Things Happen™.
I Want to Do What You Do
When it comes to animation and VFX, Bungie really does have some wildly talented people behind the screens. And while we are only talking with a few of them for this interview, the team is made up of a rather large number of people across multiple disciplines. Some may work on boss animations specifically, while others like Jonathan and Ben work on rewards or emotes, but they all are able to work together and collaborate on any aspect.
So, how did you get started at Bungie? And how much fun and freedom do you have, or is there a lot of “red tape” and rules that you must abide by?
Ben: I got my start in VFX doing cosmetic mods for a game called Team Fortress 2, and in doing so I fell in love with VFX. I really enjoy solving puzzles and figuring things out, and the VFX allows me to basically do that for a living. I ended up going to school for VFX and applied to Bungie after I graduated. Bungie said, “Hey, do you want to do the same thing you were doing for TF2, but for a paycheck?” I happily accepted.And the amazing thing about Bungie is that my creativity has never been stifled. I've had good creative control over my work, so whatever little tweaks or fun tidbits that I want to add into an emote or finisher, I get to do it. For example, the DIY Forgemaster emote that launched with Season of the Risen. Originally, it was going to be like a shotgun or pistol or something, just a random weapon, and around that time Telesto was breaking every other day. So, I was like, alright, it'd be funny if we put Telesto as the weapon that the players craft, since it’s always breaking. The creation of that emote ended up spurring a conversation with our NPC team who were able to make Banshee start holding Telesto in Season of the Risen. It was kind of a fun little cascade of creativity.I’ve also started introducing little Easter eggs in our emotes. We recently shipped the Apple Bobbing emote with the Festival of the Lost Event Card, and when I was first told about the concept I was like, “What if you could pull out random things from it?” So, I started with an orange—you know, since pulling out an orange from a barrel full of apples could be a funny moment. Then someone asked, “Well, what if you could pull out a Hive worm?” At that point I added like three or four things you had a small chance to pull out instead of the apple. We have a ton of emote props that that don’t add extra development cost, so adding an extra prop or two with a random chance to spawn within an emote can help add more value and spice things up for our players.
I think iIt's important to note here that you both have quite different career starts: in fact, many of us at Bungie tend to fall into that same category. Do you have any advice for anyone trying to break into the industry that might be a bit more specific to VFX or animation?Jonathan: Gotta echo what Ben said; working for Bungie is an amazing experience. I’ve had a number of industry gigs and never have I been given as much creative freedom and, honestly, respect as I currently enjoy at Bungie. I’ll be working on an emote, then shoot Ben a random message about an idea and, boom! Said emote gets a Ben-sized upgrade. If my teammates didn’t trust each other’s skills or ideas, that sort of thing wouldn’t be possible.My career path has been a little less direct than Ben’s. I actually started out with a film degree way back in 2011. I worked in reality TV for a bit, then commercials and corporate media, but on the side I loved making little shorts—especially stop motion and other animated pieces. After a few years, I realized I liked that way more than my video editing gigs, so I went and grabbed a master’s degree in animation and never looked back. (Just gonna gloss over those three years of grad school.)
Ben: I think the top piece of advice I could give anyone looking to get into games is just to start making stuff. If you are reading this and going “hey, I’d like to become a sparkle wizard as well,” the great thing is that you can learn most of the basics online for free. There are some great resources that our VFX team and myself have compiled if you are interested in learning about VFX for games:
Jonathan: For those who want to explore a career in animation, a master’s degree is not required. While a related degree can help, there are tons of easily accessible resources out there. My advice is to learn in a group of like-minded people. Whether that’s in an online course, such as Animation Mentor or iAnimate, or getting a group together on Discord to watch tutorials or collaborate on a project to learn the ropes. You can absolutely learn stuff on your own, but having others to motivate and keep you accountable, as well as provide feedback is invaluable. The vast majority of animated works out there are made by teams of artists, not individuals—learning with a group can help.
Truthfully, there could be a million different reasons why something doesn’t make it into the game. But when it does, our team is going to put so much sparkle and shine on it, you’ll probably say, “That's really dang cool!” And we think that’s truly all that matters. Before you go, we just wanted to say thank you and ask you to keep sharing your screenshots or videos on social media of you and your fireteams using our emotes to celebrate your accomplishments, we love to see them!