Archives For Work

AC3 Wins Animation Award At DICE

February 11th, 2013 — Leave a comment

It was a champagne celebration friday following the news that Assassin’s Creed 3 won the Outstanding Achievement in Animation award at this year’s DICE (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain) Awards – essentially the videogame industry equivalent of the Oscars.

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Competition was strong this year so I’m extremely happy that the Academy appreciated all the hard work and improvements made over the previous games in the series. I’m also incredibly proud of all the team-members that poured so much effort into a sequel – the collective drive to raise the bar at Ubisoft is something quite incredible to be a part of!

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Connor VGA Nomination

January 18th, 2013 — 4 Comments

He didn’t win so it was never aired, but here is the video I created for the Spike VGA’s “character of the year” acceptance speech. Not counting the mocap shoot, it was only a few days work with a little help from those on the cinematics team, (the fight portion is a modified combination of two of our ingame double-counter-kills), but I never made any cutscenes for AC3 and wanted to familiarise myself with the entire workflow.

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The Making Of Assassin’s Creed III

November 2nd, 2012 — Leave a comment

AC3 is now out in the wild and IGN has created a wonderful set of videos depicting many of the challenges that we overcame throughout development of this massive project.

Part 1: Origins – Discusses the initial production process of the game, starting back when only a small number of us formed the team in early 2010. At this stage we knew only the time period and setting, so created a test video to give an idea of how a typical play of the game might look and feel – from which point we began prototyping all the various systems and technology we’d need to make it real.

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Part 2: Refining The Assassin – Because the titular hero is the single thread tying the entire game together, this video is devoted almost entirely to the development of our new Assassin, Connor.

Continue Reading…

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Eurogamer Expo 2012 Presentation

October 18th, 2012 — Leave a comment

Here is the full 30 minute presentation plus Q&A from our recent visit to London’s Eurogamer Expo at the end of September. It had been around a decade since I’d last been to Earls Court for the late ECTS trade show and was impressed by the scale of the overall exposition, as well as the smooth running of the presentation itself. Well done Eurogamer!

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This presentation gives a fairly high level overview of our approach to the game and decisions we made due to the audience being fans rather than developers, but hopefully it provides some insight to the creative process behind our game. I’m especially happy to finally be able to share at least some of the “Target Game Footage” video we created over two years ago to set this massive project in motion.

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ACIII – Done and Done!

September 15th, 2012 — 1 Comment

As of last week Assassin’s Creed III is finished from a content perspective, and we’re having fun as a team playing through the game and really seeing how it all hangs together – I’m especially proud of the achievements of the animation teams, with those stationed in Quebec and Singapore only adding to the overwhelming size of this beast. I can’t wait until players get their hands on it on October 30th!

The press tour is about to begin, so it’s off to Boston next week and then I’ll be presenting a brief panel at Eurogamer in London at the end of September showing some behind-the-scenes footage of the processes we went through to arrive at the Assassin we know today as Connor. There are several “making of” web videos incoming also, so I’ll post them as and when they’re completed.

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E3 Done – Now To Ship

June 11th, 2012 — Leave a comment

Last work-related post before I delve back into our basement studio and finish the game. I had a great time at E3 demoing the Wii-U version of the game to many fans and developers in the Nintendo area, not to mention it being a really great opportunity to share ideas with my fellow Animation Directors on Splinter Cell & Watch_Dogs.

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Above is a video of one of the three demos we put together that showcases our new Assassin Connor in motion. The team are really excited about the response; with over 50 award nominations it should give us enough energy and encouragement to finish the game over the coming months.

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Assassin’s Creed III Cinematic Trailer

June 5th, 2012 — 2 Comments

Another great Assassin’s Creed trailer from Digic. Took a little back-and-forth to get the jumping arrow shot looking good, but I feel they nailed it. Day one of E3 down and the team is in high spirits!

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ACIII Gameplay Premiere

May 10th, 2012 — Leave a comment

Here’s a first look at in-game animation for AC3, captured earlier this year. The idea was to revitalise the Assassin – hopefully our new moves like the running assassinations and completely reworked jumping and rock-climbing will look and feel very different from previous installments.

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Mass Effect: Team Assault

April 21st, 2012 — Leave a comment

Revealed in the Mass Effect 3 Final Hours iPad app, here is early footage I captured, (you can see my login name appear as I take the base), of the Battlefield-esque multiplayer prototype we made at BioWare Montreal following the completion of Mass Effect 2.

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Basically a total conversion of Unreal Tournament, I integrated every character, (we later had several races), weapon and vehicle into the Unreal 3 engine, including rigging, skinning & animating, setting up shaders and scripting the vehicle handling and cameras.

It was a fun diversion for a few months and one which I believe proved the studio’s initiative for multiplayer content, but ultimately one that led to my departure, with the studio’s future being out of sync with my own goals.

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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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