Archive for the ‘Lecture Notes’ Category
02.07.08 Lost Odyssey’s Cutscene Consistency
Next up, in the first of three animation-related GDC ‘08 presentations giving us an insight into modern-day Japanese game development, here are my notes from the Postmortem of Feelplus’s Lost Odyssey, one of two Japanese RPGs created exclusively for the XBOX360 under the watchful eye of Microsoft Game Studios and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi.
Feelplus: Looking Back at LOST ODYSSEY - The Challenge of Cross Cultural Development
Ray Nakazato - President, Feelplus Inc.
As with each of the Japanese presentations, Nakazato began by detailing the hierarchy of the companies involved in the project. Feelplus Inc. was established in 2005, with the team quickly growing in size to the final headcount of around 100 developers, many of which came from Microsoft and SEGA. Feelplus is 1 of 3 companies under the AQ Interactive Group, (including Artoon and Cavia), and the project was a collaborative effort with Sakaguchi’s team at Mistwalker who formed the core desgin team.
27.06.08 Beowulf Mocap Postmortem
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.
19.04.08 Uncharted Mocap
At two months after the conference I’m a little late in posting my notes from the various lectures due to work commitments and the recent site overhaul, but now they’ll be forthcoming.
As an extra little teaser, there will soon be something new coming to Game Anim of interest to videogame animators everywhere over the next few weeks. So on with the notes…
Naughty Dog: Uncharted Animation - An In-depth Look at the Character Animation Workflow and Pipeline
Jeremy Lai-Yates & Judd Simantov - In-Game Animation Lead & Lead Character TD
After a fantastic opening to GDC with Ken Levine’s inciteful speech on Storytelling in Bioshock, this, my second lecture, turned out to be not quite all that I’d hoped for. I was really expecting to gain insight into their facial animation setup and workflow as my time spent with Drake’s Fortune have proven the cinematics to be something quite special and well-produced. However, the talk focused squarely on their mocap workflow which was a fairly standard 3-skeleton setup. 1 animation, 1 game, and 1 mocap - snapping poses and animations between them.
What confused those present most was, on deciding against employing Motionbuilder as part of their process due to their exporter being Maya-based, they proceeded to manually recreate many mocap-related features Motionbuilder provides inside Maya, (though with the notable absence of layers), rather than simply recreate their exporter inside Motionbuilder. This was reflected upon at the end with the closing statement - “We had a tendency to over-think things”.
13.10.07 Layers of Pixar Polish
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.
11.10.07 Morph Management
Another small post, this time on a different approach to morph-target lip-sync.
Di-O-Matic: Efficient methods for creating lip-sync blend shapes
Laurent Abucassis - Founder: Di-O-Matic
A considerably lower-key affair than Halon’s, this talk revolved around a demonstration on how to make phonetic mouth-shapes for lip-sync via blend-shapes (or morphing), something that, while offering more control over mesh deformation than simple bone positions, can be quite a pain to actually create and maintain the multitude of models required to create a blend-shape list.
While it did turn into something of a product pitch towards the end, the educational portion of the talk began with pointing out the first mistake most animators make when creating lip-sync for the first time, whereby they try to for shapes for every letter. However as Laurent said, “A letter is not a sound”.
10.10.07 Transforming Thousands
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!
09.10.07 Halon’s Pre-Cognition
I’ve added the second Adapt 2007 lecture notes below…
Halon: The Value of Pre-Visualisation
Dan Gregoire - Pre-viz supervisor on Star Wars Episodes II and III, War of The Worlds, X-Men 3 and Ghost Rider
This talk was especially of interest to me as we were just finishing the pre-vis work for a handful of outlandish actions and animation systems in my current project – a valuable process that not only helped prove their viability, but also how the visual look of the systems will play out.
These notes will be of interest to anyone currently planning out cutscene requirements, or teams looking to pre-visualise how certain gameplay elements or level action sequences might play out in something more advanced than simple documentation or even storyboard form.
With a background in videogames and animated television, Dan was drafted in to create pre-visualisations for effects-heavy scenes midway Star Wars Episode II, then continued this work on the Episode III, choreographing difficult sequences such as the fight between Yoda and Palpatine.
In addition to working on movie pre-viz, Halon is also involved in animated movies such as the upcoming Avatar and Speed Racer, as well as the recent Halo 3 “Believe” adverts. Near the beginning of the talk Dan asked the audience “Who uses pre-viz?”, and was met with a resoundingly lacking show of hands, to which he replied, “You should be”.