Just sneaking in before then end of the year, here is the second and far more comprehensive talk I attended at the earlier ADAPT conference. Happy new year everyone, et bonne anne tout le monde. Industrial Light & Magic: Building Iron Man Marc Chu – Animation Supervisor Beginnng with his history, Marc joined ILM in [...]

David Sirlin, Lead Designer on the recently released Street Fighter II HD, has created this handy microsite hosting documentation that details the rebalancing changes made to the new version. It gives an interesting insight into the design decisions bringing this latest release to fruition. I was deeply worried about a Vancouver-based team taking the mantle [...]

There’s a game in here somewhere – promotional spot from Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Via motion-graphics site Motionographer.

The other week the industry awoke to the shocking news that the last bastion of competition to Autodesk’s domination of the CG market, Softimage, was finally consumed alongside the earlier aquisition of Maya. What this kind of monopoly over the CG Industry will bring to artists in the long-term is still unclear, but the minimal [...]

After months of studied deliberation, (as well as being sidetracked by the new condo), I’ve finally taken delivery of my first ever laptop – the new Sony VAIO VGN-FW190 – with this being its virgin post. It was becoming painfully obvious that my old PC just wasn’t cutting it for a supposed game developer, (I’ve [...]

OK, back to business. The first of two sessions from ADAPT 2008 – members of the Disney team working on incoming CG film Bolt talk about their road to enlightenment regarding an intelligent solution for driving blendshapes to maintain a high quality of deformation on a character lacking clearly defined limbs and a neck area. [...]

In the spirit of UK:Resistance, “because you can’t not use pictures like this when they come along”. Seen on mental health blog The Trouble With Spikol via Marie-Jo.

Nothing’s been posted for a while because I’ve been on holiday, first in Scotland for a friend’s wedding then off to Sweden, (it seems so much closer to the UK now that I live in Canada), in the search of design inspiration. I did, however, find Sweden to be rather lacking in cutting-edge design, though [...]

I’ve just been messing around with the site, making it a little more easy to find the posts most interesting to developers that may find their way here and have dropped my last showreel onto the About page, so incase you missed it here it is. This is the reel I made in January/February 2007 [...]

The big news this week: Marie-Jo and I have finally jumped through all the legal hoops required for a freelancer/foreigner mortgage and have purchased our first joint home, right in the heart of Montreal’s Plateau – not bad considering we only began looking less than three weeks ago. It’s still over a month before we [...]

I’ve been feeling for some time now that Japanese developers have been falling behind their western counterparts in the technology side of game development, so it’s always good to hear that the Metal Gear Solid team still stand up as a cutting-edge developer – even more so when you learn this via a huge drop [...]

Siggraph starts tomorrow, so now would be a good time to post a link to Chris Hecker (et al)’s White Paper on the solution arrived at to animate user-created creatures in their upcoming release, Spore. I hadn’t considered the challenge of animating characters that don’t actually exist, and the solution they came up with is [...]

In the absence of an embedded video, here’s a link to my buddy Dave Wilkinson’s fantastically composed Prince of Persia presentation at the recent E3 trade show. Being Animation Director on a series so well know for its fluid character motion is bound to put one’s work under heavy scrutiny, but the team seems to [...]

Jock’s son passed away today. I’ve never met Jock, or his son Bobby, but his videos on youtube have kept a Scotsman in Canada entertained for the last year, not least because they feature a net-savvy over-seventy-year-old in a country only now discovering Facebook. I imagine most people waching this here in North America won’t have a [...]

It was a nice treat today to find another of my previous projects, Jade Empire, has been deemed by Microsoft to be worthy of another go – this one being added to the list of games available for download on the Xbox 360′s Xbox Originals service – pick it up now for just around $10 [...]

This, the final talk I’ll post from GDC’08, centred on the development of the first company-wide technology platform (or engine) for Square Enix. Despite the heavy tech-focus, this was the largest lineup I attended at the conference due to the chance of gleaning any information from these Japanese RPG masters. Square Enix: The Technology of [...]

Right from the off, this GDC ’08 talk was notable for the novel, (to the West anyway), approach to staffing up for this sequel. Charting the production of SSBB, the incredibly young-looking director Masahiro Sakurai began with his own hiring onto the project on March 9th, 2005 – placing the entire development time around the [...]

Next up, in the first of three animation-related GDC ’08 presentations giving us an insight into modern-day Japanese game development, here are my notes from the Postmortem of Feelplus’s Lost Odyssey, one of two Japanese RPGs created exclusively for the XBOX360 under the watchful eye of Microsoft Game Studios and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. [...]

It’s certainly some time after the event, (it’s slow going when you’re in the middle of a full production), but I’ve finally collated my remaining notes from this year’s Game Developers’ Conference that relate to animation and characters in games. So to start off, we have the head of R&D on last year’s landmark film [...]

Summer is here in Montreal and it’s hard to spend any free time at home in front of a desk, unless it’s to upload a fantastic picture of back home sent from your parents’ latest outing. Anybody thinking of holidaying in Scotland would be wise to get there ASAP while the two weeks where it [...]

Mass Effect PC is released today in North America – go pick it up! I wish I had a PC that could run it. In fact, I wish I had a PC that could at least run Battlefield 1942 :-(

Three years ago, when I first began this site, I posted this about voice actors complaining over the videogame industry’s position of not providing the same financial rewards as other more traditional media given their percieved profits – most notably residuals, (an ongoing stream of payments for the completion of past achievements). Since then, I’ve [...]

In the combined absence of a working XBOX360 and an unreasonably harsh flu knocking me on my ass for a whole week, I’ve been going Old Skool lately with some PS2 and Wii action. Thankfully, I simultaneously ran out of contact lenses so the games didn’t look as bad as they could have so an [...]

Perhaps the best advert for any product ever. Note the convincing stunt-work from poor bastard Vega… via Kotaku

At long last, we’ve finally been granted a video of the intriguing 1st-person free-running game Mirror’s Edge – and it looks amazing. They seem to be pushing the immersive 1st-person view even more than Far Cry 2, but to be honest, the game could be about anything – what I’m most excited about is the [...]

Read at Mayerson on Animation: “If you make a half hour TV show and a million people watch it, you’ve used up 500,000 hours of human life. If you make a feature and a million people watch it, you’ve used up two million hours of human life. There are only 8,760 hours in a year, [...]

[Last night, on the way to see Iron Man at the movie theatre with Marie-Jo:] Me: Can I just take 5 minutes in HMV beforehand? MJ: We only have 30 minutes to eat :( We’ll have to get in line and… Me: I won’t be long baby. I just need to pick something up. MJ: [...]

I had hoped to post about the fantastic leaps forward in ingame animation brought about by the highly publicised (in the gaming press anyway) integration of NaturalMotion’s behavioural/physics-based Euphoria middleware in the recently released GTA4. However, I was one of the unlucky few whose copy would invariably freeze during the opening stages of the game. [...]

The latest edition of HDRI Magazine has a front-page article on an interview with Shareef Shanawany, Visual Effects Lead on Mass Effect. There are some details on the post-processes that really defined the look of the game, as well as the fantastic work employed for the biotics using the crust system. I’ve always thought Mass [...]

At two months after the conference I’m a little late in posting my notes from the various lectures due to work commitments and the recent site overhaul, but now they’ll be forthcoming. As an extra little teaser, there will soon be something new coming to Game Anim of interest to videogame animators everywhere over the [...]

I plan to write an article in the near future on creating the ultimate videogame animation showreel. Not that I ever made one myself, but I know what I want to see when trawling through piles of entries. In the meantime, something to take home. If you’re sending in a showreel, don’t include actual 3D [...]

Phew. It’s around 1.30am and I’ve just finished uploading the latest theme for the site, doing away once and for all with the busy-ness of yester-year. I’ve been taking a graphic design nightclass lately and have been feeling creative, so now I can get back onto other projects. In other news, I’ve begun to really [...]

I hate Air Canada. They’ve delayed my flights and lost my luggage with such predictable regularity as to be considered clockwork. I even joined a Facebook group calling for a government inquiry into their low quality of service. But now all is forgiven, if only my next work trip involves Executive First.

Here’s an interesting video via gamepolitics.com depicting an overtly videogame-like rendering of one of American republican candidate Ron Paul’s speeches. If officially sanctioned, it must be an attempt to connect with the Halo demographic of American teens likely too busy capturing the red flag to busy themselves with something as trivial as democracy any time [...]

I don’t usually care to think about anti-videogame attorney Jack (John Bruce) Thompson lest it give him credence or, worse yet, a notion that his voice is relevant in the overarching debate over videogame censorship. But this time he’s really outdone himself with such a noteworthy argument that it’s worth sharing. After the recent Show [...]

I just discovered this nice little treasure-trove of technical notes from Pixar covering animation and rendering topics used in their film productions. As ever, we can’t directly use anything from film in our games due to the huge discrepancy in rendering times (30 frames per second vs 30 hours per frame), but they do appear [...]

I recently bought Forza Motorsport 2, enticed mostly by the car customisation editor allowing players to deeply personalise their vehicles before taking them online and racing against others, giving them a real sense of ownership of their unique vehicle. It’s amazing how much fun can be had simply winning new cars then painting them and [...]

I got sent this link today regarding a new mocap studio in India. The picture says it all…

On Tuesday I fly to San Francisco for this year’s Game Developer’s Conference so have drawn up a schedule below, (despite not being 100% fixed on many talks due to the amount of overlap on my topics of interest). Decisions are in bold, while same-time alternatives remain should I change my mind. Hope to see [...]

Cameron Fielding has uploaded this excellent video highlighting some of his work on the recent Turok from Vancouver-based Propoganda Games. I’ve only played the demo, but found the 3rd-Person knife actions to really make this game stand out from other 1st-Person shooters. On the challenge of moving from a cartoony background to a realistic style [...]

Fellow Eidos team members Thierry and Sebastien (BARONTiERi and Reinart respectively of STEAMBOT Studios) have just released their first Gnomon instructional art DVDs. Not animation, but Character Design and Matte Painting. Go buy them and laugh at their funny French accents.

During game development, we often refer to fighting games as the best example of where real-time animation can be pushed due to the genre typically concentrating on only two characters in an enclosed arena, though unfortunately most often in terms of “We can’t do that – we’re not making a fighter…”. As noted on the [...]

I just read that THQ picked up the award for Best Animated Videogame of 2007 at the 35th Annie Awards. That’s very impressive in a year that also brought us Assassin’s Creed and Team Fortress 2. The complete list of nominees were: Avatar: The Last Airbender “The Burning Earth” – THQ, Inc. Bee Movie Game [...]

Recently Watchdog, (a UK consumer complaint show), ran an article on DS Brain Training / Brain Age supposedly discriminating against accents – especially those of Northern England and Scotland. As silly as this sounds, I actually found it to be entirely true when playing despite commanding a relatively well-spoken Scots tongue myself, though was impressed [...]

A lot has been said over the past few weeks concerning the sexual content of Mass Effect, most notably the controversially unresearched Fox TV spot below. As a former member of the dev team responsible, (who directed a portion of the motion-capture actors involved – though full cutscenes weren’t my gig), I can perhaps speak [...]

I finally concede defeat – I’ve played a Wii game that isn’t shit. Despite being a huge fan of the Zelda series, I found even the Wii launch title Zelda to fall flat on its face after just an hour’s play and has never been touched since. I did, however, receive a copy of Mario [...]

A spot of reminiscing was had this week after I spied my first ever project, Tom & Jerry: War of The Whiskers, (hey – we’ve all got to start somewhere right?), on the latest list of original XBOX games made compatible for the XBOX360. It brought back both good and bad memories to throw it [...]

In light of Kotaku’s recent gallery of games industry work desks I thought I’d add my own to the mix, taken late last year to accompany my testimonial on the Eidos Montreal website. As you can see, I run a tight ship… I’m sure the sterile environment will change over time as we’d only been [...]

Jurie Horneman, (Champion of the recent Manhunt 2 credits fiasco), has posted links to several galleries displaying animation of Eastern European origin. I don’t know about North America, but these kinds of disturbing and unsettling images were all part of growing up as a kid in Europe, especially a kid interested in animation. Lately I’ve [...]

Capcom have released two ingame videos of their upcoming Street Fighter IV. Anybody who knows me will understand that this is incredibly exciting, especially as the moving images have quashed any fears brought about by the dodgy early screenshots from EGM’s cover story last month.

A name like a bad guy from a Van Damme flick hasn’t stopped Johnny Lee from creating some incredibe 3D apps using a Wii remote connected to a PC, most recently this fantastic DIY Desktop Virtual Reality Display. I recently saw Beowulf in full Imax 3D and came out wondering two things. Why did they [...]