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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This week Epic released their Unreal3 SDK for free download for non-commercial use, which is the same development software we use here to create Mass Effect 2 (minus custom bells and whistles). I’d recommend this over any other engine for those wanting to break into the industry right now as it’s fast becoming a standard [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In a recent japanese videogame tech magazine, (why don’t we have these?), Namco discusses the optimisation of Soul Calibur’s female skeletons from the PS3 to the PSP: In both Soul Calibur IV and Soul Calibur Broken Destiny, everything, including fabrics, is animated by “bones”. On the PS3, there are two separate bones in each breast, [...]

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 [...]

I loved the original Techno Viking, so I nearly fell out of my chair laughing upon stumbling across this hilarious parody done by Austin and his team over at my sister studio, Pandemic.

In a follow-up to the recent post on the AIAS Awards relating to animation, I must congratulate Dave (and his team) on winning the Outstanding Achievement in Animation category. If any of you out there would like to work with “The Academy Award Winning Animation Director”, sign up here as he recently rejoined our team, [...]

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 [...]

The other week the industry awoke to the shocking news that the last bastion of competition to Autodesk’s domination of the CG market, Softimage, was finally consumed alongside the earlier aquisition of Maya. What this kind of monopoly over the CG Industry will bring to artists in the long-term is still unclear, but the minimal [...]

In the absence of an embedded video, here’s a link to my buddy Dave Wilkinson’s fantastically composed Prince of Persia presentation at the recent E3 trade show. Being Animation Director on a series so well know for its fluid character motion is bound to put one’s work under heavy scrutiny, but the team seems to [...]

Right from the off, this GDC ’08 talk was notable for the novel, (to the West anyway), approach to staffing up for this sequel. Charting the production of SSBB, the incredibly young-looking director Masahiro Sakurai began with his own hiring onto the project on March 9th, 2005 – placing the entire development time around the [...]

At long last, we’ve finally been granted a video of the intriguing 1st-person free-running game Mirror’s Edge – and it looks amazing. They seem to be pushing the immersive 1st-person view even more than Far Cry 2, but to be honest, the game could be about anything – what I’m most excited about is the [...]

I had hoped to post about the fantastic leaps forward in ingame animation brought about by the highly publicised (in the gaming press anyway) integration of NaturalMotion’s behavioural/physics-based Euphoria middleware in the recently released GTA4. However, I was one of the unlucky few whose copy would invariably freeze during the opening stages of the game. [...]

I plan to write an article in the near future on creating the ultimate videogame animation showreel. Not that I ever made one myself, but I know what I want to see when trawling through piles of entries. In the meantime, something to take home. If you’re sending in a showreel, don’t include actual 3D [...]

Here’s an interesting video via gamepolitics.com depicting an overtly videogame-like rendering of one of American republican candidate Ron Paul’s speeches. If officially sanctioned, it must be an attempt to connect with the Halo demographic of American teens likely too busy capturing the red flag to busy themselves with something as trivial as democracy any time [...]

Cameron Fielding has uploaded this excellent video highlighting some of his work on the recent Turok from Vancouver-based Propoganda Games. I’ve only played the demo, but found the 3rd-Person knife actions to really make this game stand out from other 1st-Person shooters. On the challenge of moving from a cartoony background to a realistic style [...]

During game development, we often refer to fighting games as the best example of where real-time animation can be pushed due to the genre typically concentrating on only two characters in an enclosed arena, though unfortunately most often in terms of “We can’t do that – we’re not making a fighter…”. As noted on the [...]

I just read that THQ picked up the award for Best Animated Videogame of 2007 at the 35th Annie Awards. That’s very impressive in a year that also brought us Assassin’s Creed and Team Fortress 2. The complete list of nominees were: Avatar: The Last Airbender “The Burning Earth” – THQ, Inc. Bee Movie Game [...]

Capcom have released two ingame videos of their upcoming Street Fighter IV. Anybody who knows me will understand that this is incredibly exciting, especially as the moving images have quashed any fears brought about by the dodgy early screenshots from EGM’s cover story last month.

In the last few weeks I’ve been getting out to a handful of various presentations, beginning with the IGDA BioShock presentation and most recently a week-long film and videogame visual extravaganza at the 2007 Adapt Conference. Representatives from Disney, Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic and several high-profile game development studios were in town to share [...]

You can keep your fancy 3D graphics – if ever there was a reason to pick up a 1080P HDTV then here it is. The first images of Super Streetfighter II Turbo: HD Remix have been posted on this Capcom blogpost, (though it’s not REALLY Capcom because it’s not Japanese). Just as the game is [...]

On Sunday, I finally got around to visiting the fantastic Body Worlds 2 exhibit down at the Montreal Science Centre. Despite being an amazing opportunity to dispell many taboos about death and the physical workings of the human body, as well as being the best anti-smoking advert ever, there were a few things pertaining to [...]

It isn’t Pixar quality, but it sure is close. Here is the latest game/source-engine promo for Valve’s upcoming Team Fortress 2. I’m sure the animation team at TF2 jumped at the chance to create this as I can’t imagine too many cutscenes featuring in a non-story based game such as Team Fortress, (but then why [...]

An important update today in the form of sharing news that Puppetshop, the 3D Studio Max plugin created during the course of the alsoran’s current project to supplement Autodesk’s own animation tools, is now available for download from the alsoran’s former colleague’s site. Perhaps the most important aspect of this plugin is that it has [...]

Check out this flash animation from spriter Proxicide, using game assets from both the Streetfighter and Mortal Kombat series. Perhaps one day the actual in-game animation will flow with such smooth choreography.

As pointed out by one of his colleagues, the first instance of a prediction by the alsoran has come to pass. The gamespot videoreview of EA’s NBA Live 06 for the XBOX360 makes a point of stating that “…a lot of the animations by themselves look great…the problem comes in how all these animations blend [...]

Recently, the alsoran finished playing what will arguably be one of the most important videogames ever released with regards to moving towards a more cinematic experience whilst remaining fully interactive. This is due in most part to the player’s ability to always control the camera, even during cutscenes. Importantly, the player is always able to [...]