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 featuring virtual actors, followed by a trio of Japanese developers giving insight into their approaches to animation and character development.

Sony Pictures Imageworks: A Believable Character Postmortem: Motion Capture on the Virtual Set of BEOWULF

Parag Halvadar – Lead R&D Engineer

Hailing from the same studio that created Monster House, Halvadar’s talk concentrated on facial motion as that’s a recent topic for games industry. As is often the case with movie industry approaches they couldn’t directly be recreated for use in a game development situation, but nonetheless provided an interesting insight into some of the lengths that must be gone to in search of the (some say, false) holy grail of truly photo-real virtual characters.

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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 doesn’t rain holds up.

I have many a fond memory of viewing beautiful scenes like this through rain-covered car windows, steamed up with a family’s-worth of impatient breath and opened flasks of tea, finally taking one triumphant run outside during a break in the clouds before driving back home again to our Sunday dinner and less weather-reliant pursuits of newspapers and videogames.