We -PC gamers- play a lot of first person shooters, watching a gun being held in front of us is something we are very used to, up to the point that we sometimes dont stop to consider how this is achieved or if it can be improved in any way.
While making animations for Depth, I started to realize the difficulties of achieving a convincing experience, and also reinforcing a few theories I previously had about the genre.
To start off, the standard in most games is to have a pair of hands holding a gun floating next to the camera to give the player the impression of being able to see what their character see.
In Depth we use a very different system, we actually have the camera attached to the third person player model, meaning that you really do see what your character sees.
Alex Quick -our project leader- was the one who had the idea of using this system, and I've only seen two games that use this the same way that we do, "The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher's Bay" and "Thief: Deadly Shadows", both awesome games (actually, I think Mirror's Edge used this too, but Im not entirely sure).
A few other games have a mix of this and the standard "floating hands" system, where you can see the legs of your third person character if you look down and the floaty hands rendered on top of it (i.e. Crysis, Left 4 Dead), which is probably the best way to achieve a convincing body awareness experience whilst avoiding all the troubles of "real" first person cameras.
What are the troubles of a real first person camera you might ask? Lots of them, but so are the rewards if you decide to stick with it.
There's 3 fundamental issues you need to avoid if you decide to stick the camera on your character's head:
1-Clipping:
It's very normal with this setup to see your limbs going through the camera, the only way to make it work 100% like real eyes would be to adjust the FOV (field of view) to tunnel like proportions, so instead you must adjust animations to fix this issue.
2-Perspective:
Again a FOV related issue, if the character's hand/weapon is too far from the camera is looks ridiculously small. With the normal "floaty hands" setup this is easy to avoid since the hands are rendered in a different FOV than the rest of the world, but with our setup this is obviously not an option, so instead it (once again) requires some tweaking to the animations.
3-Being able to see your hands:
This sounds silly as hell, but's in fact the most important section of this post. The human's eye visual range is clearly greater than the one represented in a screen (about 170° vertically and 200° horizontally against whatever your flat screen supports), and you can also feel if you have a weapon in hand so you know it's there even if you can't see it (we also have another sense used for body awareness, so we know where our feet are even if we can see them, and no, Im not talking about the sense of touch).
What does this whole thing means to you? It means that all that you usually see in first person shoothers is a visual illusion.
Think about it, would you hold a shotgun directly in front of your head when you are "shooting from the hip"?
If you pick up an object, do you hold it directly at the same height of your head or do you simply look down?
We take these things for granted, but if you could see what your character does when he holds these objects you would agree that he/she probably has some kind of mental retardation.
Am Im sorry to break this up to you, but every time you aim down the sights of a weapon in a game the stock is going right throught your face.
Going back to Depth's camera system, getting the sweet spot between a realistic animation while veiwed from the outside, and one that also looks good from the first person perspective takes some work, but if you get it right it actually makes a lot of sense. You actually get a sense of "this is my body, these are my legs, this is my arm" which in a game like this I think it pays off, and you also know that what you see is what others see, which is something that I personally find missing in many games.
Incidentally, now you know why you can't aim down the sights on the speargun :D
Post by Alejandro Gorgal (aka Linfosoma), Depth's character modeler/animator and professional forum troll.
