– involved some real technical and game design challenges.
Getting expressive, stretchy Warner Bros.-style animation was also a priority for Gavin and partner Jason Rubin — so much so that Crash himself used up (of the 1, polygons they are got the PlayStation to render for every animation frame. But those characters would still look too stiff if they used the standard “skeletal” 3D animation of the day, which layered body part on top of virtual “bones” that moved a bit robotically.
To get around that, the Naughty Dog team pre-baked and stored positional animation data for all of Crash’s 600 different vertices across every in-game animation. Getting all that data to fit on the PlayStation’s limited hardware, though, involved writing a custom compression algorithm that threw out unnecessary data for vertices that did not move as much. The result was a ” or to 1 compression, “Gavin recalls, a huge savings that allowed for much more fluid and cartoonish animations.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings