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 retained something of the same look as all the other games rendered in the Unreal 3 Engine, but perhaps we did manage to put our own stamp on it with little tricks like the grain filter and custom depth-of-field, (the DOF in the image above was Unreal 3’s default at the time). And if I wouldn’t love to make a game locked at 24fps with motion blur.

As far as I’m aware, this is the first time they’ve run a cover story on videogame VFX, which is usually the territory of film and television only. Definitely a great step forward and some great recognition for the excellent work done by Shareef and the rest of the VFX team, even if they did kill the framerate throughout (and to a degree, post) production ;-)

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 next few weeks. So on with the notes…

Naughty Dog: Uncharted Animation – An In-depth Look at the Character Animation Workflow and Pipeline

Jeremy Lai-Yates & Judd Simantov – In-Game Animation Lead & Lead Character TD

After a fantastic opening to GDC with Ken Levine’s inciteful speech on Storytelling in Bioshock, this, my second lecture, turned out to be not quite all that I’d hoped for. I was really expecting to gain insight into their facial animation setup and workflow as my time spent with Drake’s Fortune have proven the cinematics to be something quite special and well-produced. However, the talk focused squarely on their mocap workflow which was a fairly standard 3-skeleton setup. 1 animation, 1 game, and 1 mocap – snapping poses and animations between them.

What confused those present most was, on deciding against employing Motionbuilder as part of their process due to their exporter being Maya-based, they proceeded to manually recreate many mocap-related features Motionbuilder provides inside Maya, (though with the notable absence of layers), rather than simply recreate their exporter inside Motionbuilder. This was reflected upon at the end with the closing statement – “We had a tendency to over-think things”.

Read entire post…

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 files containing meshes, rigs and or animation from games you’ve worked on – especially unreleased ones. One would think that’s a no-brainer, but sometimes people need to be told…

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 move forward with my Canadian Residency application. This does fall short of full citizenship, (the main difference being I’ll still be unable to vote), but I should finally be able to pick up one of these fine accommodations that still seem to be very affordable in Montreal once my “Johnny Foreigner” status has been removed.

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.