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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Valve have posted the slides of Mike Booth’s recent Stanford AIIDE-09 conference presentation. While only the first section on path-finding will likely be of most interest to animators, he also goes some way to breaking down the famed AI Director used to dynamically tailor the game experience for each new playthrough. They certainly give the [...]

I’m currently playing through this one on my new PS3 slim and must say that of all the unique features Little Big Planet has, the puppet-like emoting is the most fun I’ve had in ages. Here’s a little bit of info on the animation in (I believe the incoming PSP version of) the game. Looks [...]

Still with Capcom’s fighter, the more I play it the more I realise the actual animation is merely “functional”, but I imagine that’s what is required to ship a reboot of a franchise where every animation is subject to timing changes for game balancing throughout the project. What appeals most about this visuals are the [...]

An enterprising player has figured out how to swap out animation sets on the PC version of Streetfighter IV, to great comic effect. What’s most interesting about this is that it’s all handled very gracefully (doesn’t break the system, which could have happened so easily) revealing a little about how their animation is stored. That [...]

Still on my pixel art trip, I created this out of fridge magnets the other day. Coincidentally, one of the guys at work forwarded this page by SNK Playmore illustrating their methods for pixel art creation, (which they refer to as “Dot Art”.) While I’ve always been a fan of Capcom’s games, I do appreciate [...]

Last summer, Sony announced the cancellation of internal projects The Getaway 3 and Eight Days, with the former garnering most of the press. Sometime later, a video demonstrating the basic navigation and cover system of Eight Days was uploaded to YouTube by near-legendary former BioWare/Ubisoft/Sony (& more) animator Jim Jagger, demonstrating a system far in [...]

At the risk of coming across as a fanboy, here is a second dose of Metal Gear 4 details divulged on the net. It appears that the Kojima Productions team did the rounds quite a bit post-release as it includes yet more images and information on the making of Metal Gear 4. The image to [...]

David Sirlin, Lead Designer on the recently released Street Fighter II HD, has created this handy microsite hosting documentation that details the rebalancing changes made to the new version. It gives an interesting insight into the design decisions bringing this latest release to fruition. I was deeply worried about a Vancouver-based team taking the mantle [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I just discovered this nice little treasure-trove of technical notes from Pixar covering animation and rendering topics used in their film productions. As ever, we can’t directly use anything from film in our games due to the huge discrepancy in rendering times (30 frames per second vs 30 hours per frame), but they do appear [...]

Every so often the internet turns up a gem. It may have been around for some time now in its original form, but below I’ve provided an animation-related analysis of SCE’s original “Making of Shadow of The Colossus” presentation – a technologically impressive game with one or two valuable lessons on getting the most out [...]