Let’s say Videogame animators animate at 60 fps, how then is it possible to achieve 120, 244 fps and it looks and feels smoother? Is it interpolation or is there some other logic behind it like tweens?
And wouldn’t that diverge from the intended feel and timing of the game? Similar to how placing extra in-between frames in film animation changes the timing of actions.
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Games aren’t “animated” for a specific framerate. That would imply that movement is pre-rendered. Stuff that needs to deform has time-fixed keyframes and the stages inbetween are calculated on the fly. Stuff that moves is, too, calculated in real time. Some games get wonky when they aren’t locked to a specific framerate, but that is mostly a program design mistake (using elapsed frames instead of elapsed time for the physics timestep or such).
3D games are animated using “key-frames” where the animator poses the character. Then the computer figures out the in-between transition. If at frame time=0 the character looks up and at time=1sec the character looks down, the software will fill in the smooth transition from looking up to looking down. This saves tons of time because you don’t need to animate all 60 frames, or god-forbid all 244. Faster frame rate means changes between frames is smaller, appearing smoother.
Extra frames in film animation are added when an especially fast movement isn’t readable at the typical frame rate. (But most scenes are perfectly done at the lower frame rate, saving TONS of animator effort) Games work similar with key-frames being grouped densely for fast/complex actions, but used more sparingly for a slower/simpler animations.
During a frame, a lot of things happen :
1. Inputs are taken into account to trigger some actions
2. Objects, characters, and the camera, move in the scene (translating and rotating)
3. Characters and some objects animate, in other words they change their shape (or sometimes color or other properties).
4. …
The 3rd point here is what you are talking about. Indeed, animations are usually created for 60 fps, which means they can’t exactly be executed as normal with higher framerate. There are several solutions to this :
* Play the animation faster (this is rarely used because it looks very unrealistic)
* Play the animation at 60 fps, thus keeping basically the “shape” (I use this word instead of “frame” to avoid confusion) of a character identical for 2-4 frames
* Interpolate between the previous “shape” and the next one, to create additional intermediate shapes.
Which of the last two solutions depends on the game and studio. The last one can somewhat change the “feel” of the animation, though at more than 60 fps it’s not that visible anyway.
In the end, what feels “smoother” at higher than 60 fps generally has little to do with animations themselves.
Rather, the reduced inputs delay an be noticed (especially for games than can have 1-2 extra frames of delay, to actually process an input).
The movement of characters and objects, even if not animated, can also give a “smooth” visual feedback. Movement without animation would look a bit weird if you slow it down, because characters would be “sliding”, but at high framerate the human eye cannot really notice the lack of animation or interpolated animations.
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