I’ve added a collection of animation/physics-related papers to the Academic Papers section of the links page, courtesy of my esteemed colleague Simon Clavet. I don’t pretend to understand the half of it, but you may wish to share it with the programmer in your life because if you’re not already incorporating procedural physics into your [...]

I took the time this last week to put together a reel of my work on Mass Effect 2, done between late 2008 and early 2010. Look below for a full shot breakdown, and, because you’re gonna ask, the music is Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy. Shot Breakdown Below is a breakdown of what [...]

DICE have posted a number of slides covering various aspects of their games’ development over on their website. While there’s a beautiful presentation from middleware company Illuminate Labs on their lighting technology in Mirror’s Edge, arguably the game’s standout visual feature, of interest to animators will be the one on the creation of their first-person [...]

I used to love anime when I was a kid, growing up on Akira and the Japanese/French series Cities of Gold, and patiently waiting for Manga UK to import each episode of  The Guyver into my local game store. That was until I realised that beyond a small collection of gold, most anime is utter shit, (or [...]

Now either students are getting more talented at rendering, or 3D packages are becoming more democratised and so affording more time to learn, but here’s a fantastic videogame-inspired piece by Yongsub Song. You know your artform is maturing when even homages are becoming part of pop culture – especially when the BBC picks up on [...]

While it’s always been a format for mocap files, its recent adoption as an optional non-proprietary animation import format by the Unreal 3 Engine as well as take-up by development teams within the industry means .fbx is fast becoming the real standard format for transferring animation data between varying content-creation packages and game engines, so [...]

Due to the heavy reliance on video examples it was insufficient to simply post slides of the session I gave at the Montreal International Game Summit in November, so here is the full write-up outlining a proposal for a different approach to cutscenes as a form of delivering cinematic experiences in videogames. First, a little [...]

I’m playing through Braid again after the initial realisation that years of hand-holding in 3D have softened my platforming and puzzle-solving skills, and took a trip over to the portfolio site of David Hellman, artist behind the beautiful painterly worlds. While the painterly style is the defining feature, the animation does fit the unsettling Czechoslovakian [...]

Here’s a fantastic game-influenced pixel animation from director Jérémie Périn. Hilarious, and about as NSFW as a bunch of moving pixels can be. [via Motionographer]

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 [...]

By some strange paradox, E3′s lack of announcements regarding the next “next generation” of hardware has prompted many news sites (and publishers) so speculate as to when the next cycle will begin. When I first began animating games at home in my highschool years and was invited up to the local game studio, DMA Design, [...]

Last summer, Sony announced the cancellation of internal projects The Getaway 3 and Eight Days, with the former garnering most of the press. Sometime later, a video demonstrating the basic navigation and cover system of Eight Days was uploaded to YouTube by near-legendary former BioWare/Ubisoft/Sony (& more) animator Jim Jagger, demonstrating a system far in [...]

It’s Oscar season. More importantly for this space however, the nominations for the 2008 Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences awards are in. Why is this relevant? Because unlike most end-of-year videogame awards these are peer-based, not to mention having two awards devoted to animation and character performance. Additionally, after missing out on Console Game [...]

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 latest issue of IdN magazine features an interview with motion graphics studio Logan’s Alexei Tylevich on his collaboration with Hideo Kojima to create the ten tv-spot-style intros for Metal Gear Solid 4, revealing a fair assessment of game development through the eyes of a design studio. While what we’re doing is very segmented – [...]

Check out these initial pre-vis tests for the Dark Knight movie’s Batpod, done by my old college buddy (and fantastic animator), the equally fantastically named Brendan Body. One of my most enjoyable parts of game development is the pre-visualisation stage preceeding pre-production. It’s when your imagination can run wild before the harsh realities of real [...]

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 [...]

There’s a game in here somewhere – promotional spot from Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Via motion-graphics site Motionographer.

I’ve just been messing around with the site, making it a little more easy to find the posts most interesting to developers that may find their way here and have dropped my last showreel onto the About page, so incase you missed it here it is. This is the reel I made in January/February 2007 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I just discovered this nice little treasure-trove of technical notes from Pixar covering animation and rendering topics used in their film productions. As ever, we can’t directly use anything from film in our games due to the huge discrepancy in rendering times (30 frames per second vs 30 hours per frame), but they do appear [...]

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 [...]

Every so often the internet turns up a gem. It may have been around for some time now in its original form, but below I’ve provided an animation-related analysis of SCE’s original “Making of Shadow of The Colossus” presentation – a technologically impressive game with one or two valuable lessons on getting the most out [...]

Traditionally, videogames have three character archetypes around which all modern character selections are based. Slow but strong, fast but weak, and an average of the two. These basics can be deepened by additional attributes, but this basic model of advantages/disadvantages holds true to this day. It should be the animator’s task to bear these characteristics [...]