Everyone’s talking about it so it would be rude not to post that the new trailer for Rockstar’s (Sydney-based team Bondi’s) L.A. Noir dropped yesterday and the facial performances look fantastic. Using Depth Analysis’ MotionScan technology, they appear to be going all out to capture the performances of apparently over 200 characters. While the visual [...]

Gotta love French Trio We Are ENFANT TERRIBLE’s video for their song Snap Dragon. Sounding a lot like my current obsession, Crystal Castles, the visuals are an obvious homage to Double Dragon, and I can make out sounds from Streets of Rage 2, Streetfighter 2 and the classic Konami startup screen.

DICE have posted a number of slides covering various aspects of their games’ development over on their website. While there’s a beautiful presentation from middleware company Illuminate Labs on their lighting technology in Mirror’s Edge, arguably the game’s standout visual feature, of interest to animators will be the one on the creation of their first-person [...]

I’m not a fan of stop-motion animation purely because it’s so difficult to create that that in itself is part of the charm, which always leaves we wondering if we’d accept all the jerky motions if we believed they were down to a lack of polish. This, however, looks awesome and is a very clever [...]

I am forever confused by the duality of games players (and developers) on the opposing subjects of art and censorship in games. The former gives rise to claims of higher meaning in their creations or past-times, while the latter all too frequently finds defence in being “only a game”, and therefore absolved of the same [...]

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick says a lot of things. While he has talked at previous investor conferences about facial animation, (curious in itself as an investor buzz-topic), he joins a growing line of non-animators claiming to have overcome the biggest challenge in CG acting. Speaking at the recent America Merrill Lynch conference: “This has been [...]

Speaking at this month’s CESA Developers’ Conference in Yokohama on a talk entitled “The Power to Move: Looking Outside the Industry to Grow as an animator”… [Last Guardian Director, Fumito] Ueda-san ended his talk saying that good animators should not only be discovered, but nurtured and educated. He thinks that animators are incredibly valuable to [...]

You can stop at the sunset flip – it doesn’t get any better than that. [via  Matt]

Once again, the Japanese Softimage site has posted information on another showpiece title – and they spend a heavy amount of time talking about how Softimage interfaces with Motionbuilder. This is encouraging for me as I’ve decided to dive fully into Motionbuilder for my current project after finding it to be the most rounded solution for [...]

I recently returned from a photography trip to Afrika, where the animals were the most realistic I’d ever encountered. Impressive quadruped IK solving and a keen look-at awareness placed them firmly in the world, and their 24-hour behaviour was a joy to behold where linear scripted sequences were topped by a free-roaming intelligence allowing me [...]

I used to love anime when I was a kid, growing up on Akira and the Japanese/French series Cities of Gold, and patiently waiting for Manga UK to import each episode of  The Guyver into my local game store. That was until I realised that beyond a small collection of gold, most anime is utter shit, (or [...]

I love isometric 3D in games, so alongside the awesome EDGE I have a new love on iPhone in Eboy FixPix. I’ve been a fan of his for some years now but have found a new level of appreciation for the work when viewed in pseudo 3D by tilting the device to achieve the parallax [...]

Now either students are getting more talented at rendering, or 3D packages are becoming more democratised and so affording more time to learn, but here’s a fantastic videogame-inspired piece by Yongsub Song. You know your artform is maturing when even homages are becoming part of pop culture – especially when the BBC picks up on [...]

The Mocap Club has posted an interview with Uncharted 2 Cinematics Lead, Josh Scherr on the mocap process for the game’s high quality cinematics, complementing the videos on the subject included with the game. Some technical insights towards the end, but most interesting of all is the emphasis placed on the human side of the [...]

While it’s always been a format for mocap files, its recent adoption as an optional non-proprietary animation import format by the Unreal 3 Engine as well as take-up by development teams within the industry means .fbx is fast becoming the real standard format for transferring animation data between varying content-creation packages and game engines, so [...]

I just got my second Xbox Red Ring, leaving me out of the Read Dead Redemption multiplayer action for the foreseeable future. Given that I got the first one as soon as I stuck Rockstar’s last opus GTA4 in the tray I’m wondering if they’re overclocking the console in a similar manner to which Chains [...]

One can’t help thinking that this is a little in bad taste, given the recent failed bombing attempt in Times Square, but that doesn’t stop this classic game-inspired short “Pixels” by director Patrick Jean being awesome.

Those of you not visiting via a feed reader will notice that the site has undergone another of its annual facelifts, though this time the occasion is significant for two reasons: First of all, this May marks the 5th anniversary of maintaining this blog. When I first started I wrote under a pseudonym as the [...]

Due to the heavy reliance on video examples it was insufficient to simply post slides of the session I gave at the Montreal International Game Summit in November, so here is the full write-up outlining a proposal for a different approach to cutscenes as a form of delivering cinematic experiences in videogames. First, a little [...]

I’m playing through Braid again after the initial realisation that years of hand-holding in 3D have softened my platforming and puzzle-solving skills, and took a trip over to the portfolio site of David Hellman, artist behind the beautiful painterly worlds. While the painterly style is the defining feature, the animation does fit the unsettling Czechoslovakian [...]

A few people at work have pointed me towards this audio interview I gave after the MIGS talk at the end of last year (a summary of which is still forthcoming, but you can see the slides here if you have a magnifying glass). If you can put up with the dodgy accent there may [...]

When I’m not making games, my hobby is graphic design, specifically web content. I’ve been able to fold this back into game development by creating web-based asset-tracking and communication tools that have helped both the Edmonton and Montreal teams throughout development of Mass Effect 2, and here’s a little something I can share. iPress is [...]

Today in North America – Friday in Europe. Go pick it up for Xbox or PC! This is the launch trailer, and I count some 75% of the shots here were done by the Montreal Cinematics team. So far the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, but I still nervously await the ultimate litmus test – [...]