Archive for the ‘character’ tag
Final Fantasy Face-Driven Technology
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 FINAL FANTASY
Taku Murata – General Manager, Technical Research Division
Traditionally, a new platform was created for each title, with the game first made in Japanese and translations following much later. This looks set to change with the latest upcoming releases which will be very exciting to many western fans, and the target platforms (for the engine) are PS3, PC and XBOX360.
Murata’s history reads like something of a chronology of technological breakthroughs in Japanese game development, with much of his work driven by animation – in particular facial animation. Of interest most of all was the admission that several of the driving forces for this new engine centred on displaying characters’ faces to a very high fidelity in close-up.
Smash Bros Character Conformity
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 three year mark.
Sora Ltd: Development – SUPER SMASH BROS. BRAWL
Masahiro Sakurai -Director
Despite directing the original SSB games under the Nintendo/HAL Laboratory collaboration, Sakurai has been working as a freelance game designer since 2004 under his own company Sora Ltd. – (the company comprises just him and his assistant). After sub-contracing creative direction to Sora, Nintendo rented offices in Tokyo and employed the bulk of staff from long-time development house Game Arts. In addition, they temporarily contracted many of the original Smash Bros team for this project as HAL were not officially involved.
This is the way I’d like to see the game development process go in the future so we can move away from the restrictive full-time studio model towards a more talent based one where individual creatives and full development teams can be married, before disbanding once the pipelines and initial creative visions are established.
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.
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.