Just sneaking in before then end of the year, here is the second and far more comprehensive talk I attended at the earlier ADAPT conference. Happy new year everyone, et bonne anne tout le monde. Industrial Light & Magic: Building Iron Man Marc Chu – Animation Supervisor Beginnng with his history, Marc joined ILM in [...]

OK, back to business. The first of two sessions from ADAPT 2008 – members of the Disney team working on incoming CG film Bolt talk about their road to enlightenment regarding an intelligent solution for driving blendshapes to maintain a high quality of deformation on a character lacking clearly defined limbs and a neck area. [...]

This, the final talk I’ll post from GDC’08, centred on the development of the first company-wide technology platform (or engine) for Square Enix. Despite the heavy tech-focus, this was the largest lineup I attended at the conference due to the chance of gleaning any information from these Japanese RPG masters. Square Enix: The Technology of [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]