Here’s a first look at in-game animation for AC3, captured earlier this year. The idea was to revitalise the Assassin – hopefully our new moves like the running assassinations and completely reworked jumping and rock-climbing will look and feel very different from previous installments.

A fantastic collection of run-cycles and more in this retro piece that recalls many a childhood adventure, going some way to justify all those years of lateral movement with the singular goal of finishing. More than mere nostalgia, it’s a powerful reminder to never give up despite repeated set-backs.

Revealed in the Mass Effect 3 Final Hours iPad app, here is early footage I captured, (you can see my login name appear as I take the base), of the Battlefield-esque multiplayer prototype we made at BioWare Montreal following the completion of Mass Effect 2. Basically a total conversion of Unreal Tournament, I integrated every character, [...]

Ubisoft has recently opened the doors to its technology blog Engine Room and one of the first posts focuses on the data-driven systems developed for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood that afford animators more freedom in giving personality to the crowdlife. A summary of their GDC 2011 talk, my extremely talented team-mates Aleissia Laidacker and Nic Barbeau take us [...]

Wow. Unity just got a whole lot more appealing as a valid game-creation tool for the future. Looking a lot like NaturalMotion’s Morpheme state machine, except fully integrated into an engine and FREE, this GDC 2012 video showcases their forthcoming character animation system with all the bells and whistles a technically-adept animator could dream of. Blend [...]

The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect, which I took interest in not only because of the titular reference to one of my own games but also because I already have several similar books on the subject, is the hard-backed accompaniment released to coincide with this week’s opening exhibition of the same name [...]

While I may disagree with their approach to interactive storytelling, one can’t deny Quantic Dream’s ambition and accomplishment in terms of performance capture. Probably more than just the purported tech demo, the level of emotion captured in this piece sets a high standard with simultaneous body, facial and VO capture fast becoming the standard in our post-L.A.Noire [...]

Today I can finally share the project I’ve been working on these last two years. Assassin’s Creed III As a gamer I was sold on the series after receiving a copy of AC2 from Ubisoft, and was fortunate enough to be asked to join that same team soon after completion of Mass Effect 2, (before AC [...]

Deus Ex 3 (later to be subtitled “Human Revolution”) was what can best be described as a learning experience for me. I had just arrived in Montreal to work at another studio and while awaiting a visa was contacted regarding the mystery project at the recently announced Eidos Montreal. I honestly thought it was a [...]

This generation’s long life-cycle has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, so many years without new hardware has allowed us to push the limits of our current engines and learn so much about finesse and polish without the need to relearn or start from scratch.  The challenge this time around has been more about [...]

Currently the darlings of the CG Game Trailer world after stealing the title from Blur Studio, Digic Pictures have just released their latest reel. Although only containing a handful of updates from their 2010 version, this video shows that they owned pretty much every CG Trailer you got excited about in the last few years.