Archives For Game Animation

The Game Animation Reel

February 27th, 2013 — 18 Comments

Game Animation Demo Reels

This is a post I’ve been waiting years to write as whenever I’m knee-deep in demo reels I’m invariably too busy hiring, but all that changes this week. After sifting through hundreds of examples while creating this Vimeo group of Game Anim Demo Reels, here are my thoughts on creating the perfect demo reel with the specific intent of landing a videogame animation job. Greater length, quality and variety is expected from someone with industry experience behind them, whereas a student need mostly show potential, passion and imagination that can be nurtured. Admittedly, these are only my opinions so I’d be interested to hear what other developers think, and please also add your reel or others you know of to the group – it’s open to everyone.

Ten steps to a great game animation demo reel:

  1. Show really strong work

    It may sound obvious, but this is so important above everything else that it’s worth putting as number one. This brief list won’t tell you how to do that as it takes years and years of hard work and practice, but it will help you sell what you have in the best possible light to stand out from the increasingly talented crowd while avoiding many of the pitfalls that can detract from otherwise good animation. Making a strong demo reel is the single most important way to get my attention and make me want to work with you, so take your time and approach it with the same level of creativity and polish that you would any other project with your name on it.
    Continue Reading…

In GAME ANIM Articles, Game Animation , , , ,
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The Making Of Primal Rage

December 19th, 2012 — 6 Comments

I can’t imagine how they balanced this game after all this animation was done. Here’s a fascinating look behind the stop-motion of 1994′s Primal Rage arcade game. This was an alternate take on the video/photography-based fighting games of the time such as Mortal Kombat, and the visuals look to stand up today, albeit in a classical Ray Harryhausen style. The animation isn’t too bad either.

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In Game Animation , , ,
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Source Filmmaker & Realtime Animation

July 8th, 2012 — 1 Comment

Valve have opened the beta for their in-house cinematic tool, the Source Filmmaker. Below is a video taking us through its various features, but those I’m most interested in are the abilities to not only pause and reframe shots in realtime, but also pose and and animate characters on the fly.

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This is one of the new directions I’ve been anticipating we take as an industry as a whole as we do away with the idea of creating animations and rigs in content creation packages such as Maya and 3DS Max and animate directly in the engine, removing both the export step and more importantly the disconnect between what you make in the DCC and later see in the game with the correct camera, rigging, and all the motions blending together – allowing us to truly work in a WYSIWYG environment.

In Cutscenes, Game Animation, Rigging , , , , , , , , ,
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AI & Animation In Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

April 14th, 2012 — Leave a comment

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.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

A summary of their GDC 2011 talk, my extremely talented team-mates Aleissia Laidacker and Nic Barbeau take us through Brotherhood’s Crowd Life, Data-Driven AI and Animation Systems.

In GAME ANIM Articles, Game Animation, Work , , ,
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Unity Character Animation System

March 24th, 2012 — Leave a comment

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 trees, automatic rigging and input control should have animators working in Unity producing some incredibly fluid characters in future games.

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In Game Animation, Rigging , , , , ,
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The Models Resource

March 7th, 2011 — 8 Comments

Created by the same enterprising folks behind the homebrew gold-mine The Spriters Resource, The Models Resource is a fantastic place to grab game models ripped from recent(ish) games. So far I’ve managed to reassemble classic characters like Mario, Link, Sonic and Metal Gear Ray below.

For those game animators out there looking for some inspiration or just to add some variety to existing demoreels these should prove invaluable, and if there are any technical guys out there that fancy a quick rig and skin challenge it would be much appreciated…

In Game Animation, Rigging , , , , , , , , , ,
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First-Person Movement for Mirror’s Edge

November 5th, 2010 — 1 Comment

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 animations which, with the camera, combine to give an immersive experience not seen since Project Breakdown.

I loved the game when it came out last year and immediately started replaying on completion as well as picking up the DLC and downloading the soundtrack and the recent iPhone game, (a superior free version of which you can play here). Unfortunately without the accompanying talk the details are light, but some info can be gleaned. It’s interesting to see someone else thought of attaching a camera to a mocapped head, though it didn’t work out and good old animator talent was the solution.

Download the presentation from the Art section here.

In GAME ANIM Articles, Game Animation , , , , , ,
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Yet Another Uncanny Valley Crossing Claim

October 3rd, 2010 — 1 Comment

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick says a lot of things. While he has talked at previous investor conferences about facial animation, (curious in itself as an investor buzz-topic), he joins a growing line of non-animators claiming to have overcome the biggest challenge in CG acting. Speaking at the recent America Merrill Lynch conference:

“This has been the Holy Grail in a lot of respects for video games – the ability to have characters on the screen that you can have an emotional connection with. The medium for the last 25 years has been very visceral, interactive, immersive medium – but it was very hard to have characters to actually have empathy towards or an emotional connection with… or that might make you laugh or make you cry; be some catalyst for an emotional reaction… Call Of Duty: Black Ops is the first game where we’ve been able to perfect the facial animation, mouth movement technology so that the lines that are being delivered are believable. The facial animation looks like a real person”

As to my position on the still theoretical Uncanny Valley, I’m convinced it more than certainly exists in Masahiro Mori’s pure sense as I’ve seen (or to put it correctly, felt) it in films like Beowulf and Midnight Express, though in games we often mistakenly attribute it to a combination of bad rigging and animation – failure not even near the Uncanny Valley.

Continue Reading…

In Facial Animation, Game Animation , , , , , ,
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Nurturing Talent

September 21st, 2010 — 1 Comment

Speaking at this month’s CESA Developers’ Conference in Yokohama on a talk entitled “The Power to Move: Looking Outside the Industry to Grow as an animator”…

[Last Guardian Director, Fumito] Ueda-san ended his talk saying that good animators should not only be discovered, but nurtured and educated. He thinks that animators are incredibly valuable to any game project. “I think great animation is one of the most important advantages the Japanese entertainment industry has over other regions.”

The best teams I’ve been involved in have had an air of education about them, and the best studios feel like universities where everyone can learn from those around. The right balance of knowledgeable seniority and youthful enthusiasm raises the quality bar across the board.

Find the original (Japanese) write-up here. [via Team Ico Gamers]

In Game Animation , , , ,
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Crysis Roll’d

August 11th, 2010 — Leave a comment

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

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[via  Matt]

In Game Animation , , ,
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