All of our animations are currently done to a "first pass" quality. This means that we did all of the animations quickly to see how they work with gameplay and know what animations we would need to add or change in the future. On top of that, a majority of animations are done as "poses" which are completely static. The engine then transitions between the poses at a pre-determined speed.
Because of all of this, the animations are not ideal. We are totally aware of that. Doing animations is very hard and takes a long time (and a lot of money) so we want to be sure exactly what animations we need to do before we begin working on them. We also have to use reference material which is not always easy to find and doesnt always provide the necessary angles we need to get the right look.
We are aware that the powder skiing doesn't look natural. We dont have a system for using different animations on different terrain, so we decided to first start with a more park/piste look before going back and doing powder skiing animations.
Once the game is out we will be working with our community to refine and figure out exactly what animations should play, and when. We can also crowdsource reference material and hopefully have some of you record the material youself as examples. Until now we've been using videos of our athletes from their various competition runs or segments.
Hope that helps give you an idea where we're at.
