Archive for the ‘Film Animation’ Category

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 featuring virtual actors, followed by a trio of Japanese developers giving insight into their approaches to animation and character development.

Sony Pictures Imageworks: A Believable Character Postmortem: Motion Capture on the Virtual Set of BEOWULF

Parag Halvadar - Lead R&D Engineer

Hailing from the same studio that created Monster House, Halvadar’s talk concentrated on facial motion as that’s a recent topic for games industry. As is often the case with movie industry approaches they couldn’t directly be recreated for use in a game development situation, but nonetheless provided an interesting insight into some of the lengths that must be gone to in search of the (some say, false) holy grail of truly photo-real virtual characters.

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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 to be leaning towards shortcuts for hair that avoid complete simulations.

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 been hunting on the internet for some of the more obscure feature-length animations I soaked up at a young age and repeatedly came across the work of the late René Laloux, creator of Fantastic Planet, Gandahar and Time Masters (shown above) among others. I’d highly recommend looking out for any of these - there’s something about classic European fantasy, (and absent from their Western counterparts), that takes the imagination to a somewhat more unsettling yet provocative place.

Speaking of the West though, I did find a similar tone in Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice. Of interest is the fully rotoscoped approach taken by the film that not once conflicts with the cartoony visual style - something quite encouraging in these days of motion capture.

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 can directly employ for our own peer-review processes. The initially self-deprecating yet entertaining Andy Schmidt took us through the challenges of creating the characters for Ratatouille, (namely, how to turn vermin into an appealing character) before moving on to Pixar’s general approach to taking a scene through various levels of polish.

The biggest element of the talk that struck me was the difference between an animated film and videogame cutscene schedule - two supposedly similar projects in concept, with the key being when voice-over is recorded. Below is a comparison between Pixar and what is my experience of the norm for large-scale videogame project storytelling, taking a direct comparison with only the elements shared across mediums.

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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 upbeat yet humble attitude and the sheer multitude of videos displayed during the presentations, ranging from multiple render-passes highlighting the various explorations of lighting and materials on the robotic protagonists to behind-the-scene shots of the film plates throughout the various layers of post-production layering.

Incredibly heart-warming were the animation renders illustrating the sheer amount of cheating going on when characters went off-screen. With the original brief requiring 14 robots in total, they scoped for only 14 transformation animations, but ended up creating over 140 due to each transformation being created specifically to sell the particular shot. Some examples shown had Transformers’ legs going through the ground, various parts scaling into the body to be hidden away, even bits flying off only to return just at the moment they were required on camera – just like our cutscenes!

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