Archive for August, 2008

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 to land a job in Montreal so is a little dated. Featuring the second of three Commander Shepard models, (with crossed eyes no less ;-), it also contains the player navigation actions before the final level of polish, but enough excuses.

Continue reading for the full shot breakdown:

Read entire post…

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 get the keys, so in the meantime I’ve been impatiently recreating the main room in Google SketchUp. That’s right, those aren’t shots of a terrible port of The Sims below, but a virtual recreation of my future abode - click the images for the full-size versions.

SketchUp is free to download and I’m sure is easy to pick up even for non-videogame developers, (well, easier than a full-blown 3D package), but I’d certainly recommend it to other devs looking to try out colour schemes and various furniture layouts in advance of moving into a new place. Our level design team is currently churning out levels created in SketchUp, allowing them to quickly prototype layouts and test them in the engine well in advance of an artist with years of Max/Maya experience having to get involved as the Pro version allows export to real production 3D packages. As such, I’ve added it to the resources area of the sidebar as anyone interested in level design could do far worse than begin playing around with this.

Props can be downloaded from the large online user-created library for free,  (I’ve managed to kit it out with the real-world IKEA furniture we already have), as well as approximations of other things. And it certainly wouldn’t be a good layout if I didn’t first figure out where I’m going to be gaming for the forseeable future - even items such as the TV and consoles here have all been pre-created by an avid userbase, (to greater or lesser quality).  Imagine a time when we’d no longer have to spend months of valuable development time recreating weapons and urban landscapes for the millionth time and could simply import them from huge, free online libraries.

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 of “behind-the-scenes” images from one of the largest games to be released this year.

A few weeks back, details of the facial animation rig and other workflow info had been posted on the Japanese XSI website and I was planning to extract information via the google tranlation and observation alone, but someone beat me to it, (and managed to do a much better job than I would ever have). Head on over to Chris Evans’ (Tech-Art Lead at Crytek) blog for full translations of the following sections:

• MGS4 Facial Animation
• MGS4 Character Pipeline
• MGS4 Cluster Constraint Setup

Regarding the  facial setup, it looks very reminiscent of the same method I saw presented at ADAPT 2007 by Aaron Holly of Disney. This involved a similar setup of a bone rig driven by a mesh giving the two following important advantages.

1. It was highly flexible and able to be moved between multiple similar faces as the animation is stored on a nurbs mesh that drives the bones rather than the bones directly, therefore allowing for varying bone positions.
2. If using a pose-based facial animation solution such as FaceFX, the bones travel along the curve of a nurbs surface rather than a simple linear translation, therefore better mimicking the movement of skin across the skull.

This is certainly something I’d be keen to try in the near future given that it now appears to have successfully been put through a full videogame production.

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 very impressive indeed.

Unable to animate actual existing objects such as bones they had to create IK-based animations objects described by a process of elimination, relative to the body, then had a team of animation testers evaluate the animations on as many different character extremes as possible. Though I rarely play PC games, I’m really looking forward to giving Spore a spin not least to evaluate how successful a solution it really was, (but that’s only if I can overcome the urge to solely make penis monsters).

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 have lived up to the impressive standard set before it.

Even more impressive is that the Australian manages to last the entire 14 minutes of the interview without swearing once, despite dying an excruciating three times! (Apparently he replaced every expletive with the word “Basically“).