That’s more than can be said for my human companions. Our drunk driver Roger didn’t talk much, though he was always friendly, and the ice-queen with whom I shared a tent was 100% business. I even hung a picture of her on the wall and had the car re-painted in her favourite beige, but all to no effect. She wouldn’t even look at me…

Click here to view the embedded video.

While I can’t fault the animation, it would be nice to know if they experimented with removing the in-between interpolation to more accurately recreate the 2D feeling, as some charm is lost when the motion is smoothed out during the initial comparison they give. Regardless, I’m sure the studio’s consistently endearing characters come through in the story as much as in these great visuals.

This should certainly factor into anyone’s plans to create an animation or motion-capture database for their studio – something that’s good for both animators and designers to ensure both parties are aware of the content they have at their disposal. Download the fbx plugin for Quicktime here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That old post reminds me that Rockstar are still one of the few developers that have fully adopted Naturalmotion’s behavioural physics-based Euphoria, (most likely due to NM’s stipulation of inserting their own guys onto your team), leading to some unresponsive controls which are thankfully greatly decreased in the recent cowboy offering. The big sell will undoubtedly be their soon-to-be-released “Backbreaker” above, featuring character-on-character interactions as a centrepiece.

Beyond examples of animated gifs like the one included here, you can download Photoshop PSDs of all the character animations in the game from this handy location. Certainly worth a look to get an idea of the animation process behind this wonderfully infuriating little game.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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 across many studios and any level of knowledge of its various animation-related systems like Matinee, Kismet, FaceFX and the AnimSet and AnimTree editors would certainly be a boost at the entry level. Nowadays I’m seeing Unreal3 experience on CV’s alongside traditional software like Max and Maya, so get downloading and start tinkering away…

Looks like a simple rig in Maya to compliment the game nicely, and they use morph shapes for the facial emotes which seems a natural fit given the squashiness of the character.

Click here to view the embedded video.

All body animation appears to be rotation-only, given that the limb lengths do not warp and stretch to assume the positions of the bones in the animations. IK does however appear to be solved for each limb as the arms and legs of the shorter characters hyper-extend (stretch out) to meet the required feet and hand positions of the original animations. The only visual artifacts like this occur in the face, showing that position keys must be involved in creating the facial animations.

The camera animations for intros and special moves are bundled with the animation sets, highlighting that both the sound and visual effects of the chosen character remain intact on the character rather than the animation sets and play out on corresponding actions quite well. This illustrates that there must be identically organised sets of each for every character.

[via GiantBomb]

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, giving a total of four, and it is these which give rise to breast motion, whereas on the PSP for the sake of load reduction things had to be simplified. We managed to obtain satisfactory results with only one “bone” across both breasts.

Swaying breasts may be most enjoyable, but from time to time we are warned that they move a little too much.

Via andriasang.com

There are instructions as to the various stages of the art creation but unfortunately the text is image-based so I can’t babel it. While there are 5 characters at the time of writing, it looks like it’s going to grow over time so certainly something to check back on.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jason Porath for swiftly providing a translation for the stages of production:

1. Get the design of the character, usually from the art director, or sometimes Rough Design. One character usually takes about 3 days.
2. Make a 3d model of the character. This usually takes 2 weeks per character. You also make the ranges of motion, which takes around 2 months/character.
3. Render out the 3d character. To bake out all the animation for one character usually takes around 2 weeks.
4. Touch up the render, according to art director’s wishes. This usually takes 1 week per character.
5. Add in additional stuff like wrinkles, muscle creases, and the like, while maintaining the form. This takes each character around 6 and a half months (!). This is where all the character’s consistency in form is checked.
6. Adding in gradients. This takes 2 and a half months per character.

Each character usually has around 500 frames of animation, but some are up to 4x that.