Welcome back, dear readers, to my Uncanny Valley Special. For part two we're actually going to take a side trip out of the Valley and look at a related artist's dilemma: that of familiarity. Part of the reason we are repulsed by characters that are a fraction off of being truly human is our familiarity with what healthy humans should look like. This familiarity also extends to nonhuman animals and some critters can give an artist trouble if she or he isn't familiar with the anatomy. The hilarious results can be painful to look at.
Do you know what a colugo is? If somebody put one in a game and animated it moving around, could you tell if it looked right or not? For most people, the answer is probably no. Where exotic animals, aliens, and fantasy creatures are concerned, so long as the animations look like they fit the body it doesn't matter if they move correctly or not. Nobody is going to know the difference. The opposite is true for domesticated animals in general and the horse in particular.
Horses may not be as common a sight as cats and dogs, but the average person is exposed to them on farms, television and movies, and even in cities drawing carriages in parks or mounted by police officers. They are also one of the more common animals playing major roles in video games: we have Epona from the Legend of Zelda series and Agro from Shadow of the Colossus to name a couple. They are also hard suckers to draw or model in 3-D and harder to animate right. Even major developers can have trouble with them. Check out Nintendo's flub with the horses in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance:
Note to Nintendo for future reference:
Why do horses present such a challenge to artists? It has to do with how the bones in their legs are arranged. All animals that have arms and legs have the same basic set of bones and the joints all bend in the same basic ways. However, how those bones are proportioned can vary a great deal. Humans stand flat footed, dogs walk on their toes. Despite this difference, it's easy to draw parallels between how our limbs are arranged and how a dog's are. Horses by comparison seem to have too many joints in their legs, especially near the hoof. This illusion is due to the fact that horses walk on their finger and toe nails (the hoof is a modified nail), and those “extra” joints are simply the finger and foot/toe bones.
This arrangement gives the horse a distinct way of moving that sets it apart from other animals. Ultimately, the only way to overcome the challenge of the horse is to study its anatomy and watch much footage of horses in motion. Considering how often horses pop up in video games (even if just in cut scenes) it is a valuable beast for artists to become very familiar with.
Tune back in tomorrow for part 3 of my Uncanny Valley Special, where I'll return our focus to humans and take a close look at the face and creating expressions.
Related Links:
Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 1
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: Why I Let Termina Go Squish
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History, Part 3