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 [...]

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 [...]

Just watching the Golden Globes awards there, and the Best Animated Feature award was announced with the preface that the nominees’, (Wall-E, Bolt and Kung Fu Panda), collective box-office income amounted to the impressive half-billion dollars. That’s the same sum GTA4 took in just its first week – I guess kids just don’t have that [...]

Check out these initial pre-vis tests for the Dark Knight movie’s Batpod, done by my old college buddy (and fantastic animator), the equally fantastically named Brendan Body. One of my most enjoyable parts of game development is the pre-visualisation stage preceeding pre-production. It’s when your imagination can run wild before the harsh realities of real [...]

Just sneaking in before then end of the year, here is the second and far more comprehensive talk I attended at the earlier ADAPT conference. Happy new year everyone, et bonne anne tout le monde. Industrial Light & Magic: Building Iron Man Marc Chu – Animation Supervisor Beginnng with his history, Marc joined ILM in [...]

OK, back to business. The first of two sessions from ADAPT 2008 – members of the Disney team working on incoming CG film Bolt talk about their road to enlightenment regarding an intelligent solution for driving blendshapes to maintain a high quality of deformation on a character lacking clearly defined limbs and a neck area. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Jurie Horneman, (Champion of the recent Manhunt 2 credits fiasco), has posted links to several galleries displaying animation of Eastern European origin. I don’t know about North America, but these kinds of disturbing and unsettling images were all part of growing up as a kid in Europe, especially a kid interested in animation. Lately I’ve [...]

The final Adapt Presentation Notes Session, providing information for animators regarding character and rig development, peer-review processes and general acting tips. Pixar: How Pixar Animation Studios Brings Characters To Life Andy Schmidt – Animator on Ratatouille This was an incredibly valuable lesson in the workflow for polishing an animated feature, which has some lessons we [...]

Now a smaller note-taking session, a result only of the vast amount of content on show so as to keep one’s eyes away from the notepad. Industrial Light & Magic: VFX Used On Transformers Todd Vaziri – VFX Sequence Supervisor for Transformers One of the most entertaining presentations of the week, due to both Todd’s [...]