Just asking for a friend
EDIT: to make it clear i was talking about the roadhog animation for the upcoming changes to him, though i do wish we got more shorts but i am not complaining about that
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It actually takes a crapton of time, at least for something of high quality, especially when you gotta avoid continuity errors and inconsistencies in general.
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Depends upon the size of the team and the quality you’re aiming for.
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ask mass effect andromeda team 
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If it was a normal produced series. Which ran on a schedule. It would take around 4-5 months to complete a short. Since it’s not. That’s why it can take a year.
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I wanted to be an animator when I was young and actually went to school for it, and let me tell you there is a lot more than you think to animation. especialy 3D animation.
cell shading, aliasing, shadow casting, texturing, and polishing all take a while on their own. now you have to animate all of it too? even a seasoned professional is going to need days for one animation.
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I believe OP is talking about the roadhog ability animation Jeff talked about ,not an animated short.
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Because it comes from Blizzard themselves and not from the OW team I understand the time because they make also the movies for the other games.
OW team isthe slowest team in history but that is not there fault.
If it’s about the cinematics, i believe Blizzard has the same people doing the 3D for all their games and promotional materials, not just Overwatch. If it’s about the Roadhog thing Jeff talked about, no idea, it’s a custom game engine so who knows what they have to tweak in the code to add the new animation.
If they’re taking so much time to ensure quality, then why was there such a long gap between the Reinhardt and D.Va shorts?
Animated tv shows that have about, what? like 15 minutes of animation takes MONTHS. And thats not even very detailed work.
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I wouldn’t be suprised if the animations that Blizzard puts out takes over a year to make based on the quality of them. Also they also seem to only have 1 animation team that makes all of their animations.
It depends entirely on the kind of animation.
For a character, that can take upwards of three weeks.
For an animated short, these things can take a year, including the final render.
For more in-depth information, you should either visit BlizzCon or purchase the Virtual Ticket, because Blizzard does a lot of “behind the scenes” and “in-depth” videos during the event.
Depends how much of the company’s resources are being funnelled elsewhere, to what, how long and why.
Still would take a lot of work, since a single animation also has to be applied to the rest of the movements, as well as each skin which has various different details on them. So, it has to work smoothly.
Look at how long it took to make Doomfist’s hero select animation. Imagine animating something for actual gameplay.
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Do you know hard animation is? You have to draw a lot for just a few seconds of it. Got to 4:35 on this vid: Old Dunkey and Cuphead - YouTube
There you can see how hard it is to draw the flower boss in cuphead for 2 seconds. Which is about 60 drawings for 2 seconds of the battle. Blizzard may not be animating 2 and a half minute boss battles, but they are still animating something different for Hog. And OW uses 3D animation which takes longer than 2D because you have extra steps.
Tl;dr: Animation takes a lot of work and time, we can only wait.
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OP is a hog main. They’re referring to the animation that had to be done before his buff hits the ptr
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Takes quite a bit.
People like to think it takes no time at all. Fools…