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 animation system designs, you really should be…
Archives For physics
I just got my second Xbox Red Ring, leaving me out of the Read Dead Redemption multiplayer action for the foreseeable future. Given that I got the first one as soon as I stuck Rockstar’s last opus GTA4 in the tray I’m wondering if they’re overclocking the console in a similar manner to which Chains of Olympus did on the PSP. Is this even possible via software?
That old post reminds me that Rockstar are still one of the few developers that have fully adopted Naturalmotion’s behavioural physics-based Euphoria, (most likely due to NM’s stipulation of inserting their own guys onto your team), leading to some unresponsive controls which are thankfully greatly decreased in the recent cowboy offering. The big sell will undoubtedly be their soon-to-be-released “Backbreaker” above, featuring character-on-character interactions as a centrepiece.
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 of a console in its golden years.
Looking at the image below, they at least animate using Lightwave, though how much of their pipeline relies on it is unknown. Perhaps the Japanese industry is different as a whole, as in the West we mostly use either Maya or 3D Studio Max. Lightwave is more favoured among high-end artists for it’s renderer, not its animation system.
