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 [...]

Still with Capcom’s fighter, the more I play it the more I realise the actual animation is merely “functional”, but I imagine that’s what is required to ship a reboot of a franchise where every animation is subject to timing changes for game balancing throughout the project. What appeals most about this visuals are the [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

I’ve been feeling for some time now that Japanese developers have been falling behind their western counterparts in the technology side of game development, so it’s always good to hear that the Metal Gear Solid team still stand up as a cutting-edge developer – even more so when you learn this via a huge drop [...]

Siggraph starts tomorrow, so now would be a good time to post a link to Chris Hecker (et al)’s White Paper on the solution arrived at to animate user-created creatures in their upcoming release, Spore. I hadn’t considered the challenge of animating characters that don’t actually exist, and the solution they came up with is [...]