Scott Campbell - Double Fine Studios

Double Fine studios of San Francisco were represented at Animex by Scott Campbell, one of the very first members of the Double Fine Team. The Co creator of Psychonaughts, their first successful game, Scott worked and continues to work very closely with Tim Schaefer founder of the studio and ex- Lucas Arts creator of the cult hit Monkey Island.  The Focus of this talk was "Brutal Legend"  their recent classic rock inspired RPG.

A great deal of this presentation was made up of visual materials with brilliant concept, research (Frand Frazetta) and final game footage.  This meant not much technical knowledge to jot down in my journal but I feel it needs a blog post for its sheer brilliance, The research from the word go was album cover art from the classic rock pioneers such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Guns N Roses, Kiss and Motorhead.  In actual fact Lemmy of Motorhead was originally pinned as the lead character until eventually features as a side character as well as Ozzy Osbourne, Lita Ford and Rob Hal ford of Judas Priest.  The game's universe is enticing, the back story, written by Tim Schaefer, was conceptualised mainly by Lee Petty. Here is the general back story:

  "The fire beast Ormagoden explodes to found the world, he send his essence which is made up of fire, chrome and speed into the landscape.  Over the centuries these raw materials were harnessed by the Titans to forge hotrods, a great highway and most importantly music. Since that time the titans have ascended to become Metal Gods leaving behind their legacy. Scattered around the landscape are titanic land marks, remnants of epic proportion."

  So that's the foundation of the game and is an awesome universe for any fictional story.  The characters were designed to fit with the environment and in factions allowed all areas of the genre of "rock" to be represented. This game is more than anything proof of the potential games have for story telling and imaginative outlet.

  On a related point Tim Schaefer has released to the public his application to Lucas Arts back when he was just starting out.  His Application was on an Atari 800 in dot matrix, talk about imaginative thinking . Here's the link if you fancy a gander - http://www.gameculture.com/2009/10/02/read-play-tim-schafer039s-lucas-arts-application

Jim Gentile - Midway

Jim Gentile is a Creative Director of motion capture and animation at "House of Moves" in L.A. He has worked in the industry since 1987 and for 19 years worked for Midway.  He has also contributed to Ubisoft and Eidos with his great knowledge of motion capture.

He stressed that motion capture is a production tool and will not replace manual animation as Eric Baldwin had shown.  The clean-up of motion capture data is always needed with head stabilising and body interaction.  On average mo-cap data of a minute or so will take a single professional 15 minutes to clean-up. This in comparison to strenuous animating, of a full minute of footage, shows that with time constraints motion capture is an excellent tool. Jim Showed some great examples of his own work and definitely knew his stuff, hopefully I will experiment with motion capture at some point in the near future.

Eric Baldwin - Naughty Dog

Eric Baldwin talked on behalf of Naughty Dog Studios with focus on their new release Uncharted 2.  He graduated in Mechanical Engineering at UCLA and started work with Threshold Digital (research labs) and then moved to Nickelodeon and then Digital Domain he is now senior animator and lead facial animator at Naughty Dog.

Eric specialises in in-game cinematics (IGC). There are 2 types of cinematic:

• Live (In Engine) procedurally rendered in real-time. This allows quick exchange and active events 
• Full Motion Animations (FMA) pre-rendered in engine. allow for layering sequences, more narrative, and greater detail in shots.

The animation process is aided with motion capture technology to gather realistic movement quickly.  Multiple takes are recorded with dialogue captured on stage but can be re-recorded.  On Uncharted 2 ad lib was encouraged for realistic dialogue and spontaneity.  Reference footage of the sessions is video'd from multiple views for reference when touching up.
This is the typical cinematic's pipeline:

• Rehearsal
• Performance Capture
• Mocap Selects
• Editing
• Camera Layout

With mocap selects the most natural performances are chosen sometimes this means splitting takes, picking the moments when characters are static or out of shot and and then swapping the footage.  Storyboarding motion capture tends to constrain motion capture actors, impacting on performance so rough stage direction is the first phase of planning.

  Eric mentioned a Hamish McKenzie http://www.macaronikazoo.com/, He is a brilliant rigger and general tech guy.  By the sounds of it his influence was greatly appreciated on Uncharted 2, with his help a "Zoo Shots"  system was set up for easily switching between multiple cameras.

The big fixes are what first need to be addressed with motion capture footage. Discontinuity in data is a major issue, tidying animation curves manually is the only fix.  Mocap offsets include head direction adjustments, collar & clavicle synchronisation and body pose adjustments.  Hand contact needs to be added with finger movement and IK switching, Physical Character Interaction generally needs tweaking as well.

Final Additions to the mocap data are the facial Animations, Eric's Forte.  This requires a strong facial rig this is done with many many joints and a system similar to set driven keys, With fixer shapes in place the eye animation is first to be applied then the mouth animation (lip sync) and finally brow animation.  A brilliant talk by Eric in all, very informative and has definitely shifted my opinion on the practicality of motion capture.

Great little tips for Better Ideas

Heres a brilliant little video with tips on how to better your ideas i thought i'd share.


Tips for Better Ideas from Andrew 'Big Show' Blodgett on Vimeo.

Tristan Reidford - Valve

Representing Valve developer of the Half Life and now Left for Dead series Tristan spoke at Animex with focus on the latest Left for Dead 2. Tristan studied transport design at Coventry university and landed work with, the now Crytek owned, Free Radical Studios working on the the successful Timesplitters franchise.

He moved to Valve and has been with them for 3 years, by the sounds of his experiences he's had a part to play in many areas of the game production however character design is his forte.  the design for Left for Dead is realistic and for the human characters real actors were cast and digitally doubled for the game.  The design process for these human characters was:

• Biography (outlined personality)
• Concept Art (silhouette)
• Casting
• Reference 
• Modelling - mudbox sculpting (2-3 weeks)
• Voice Recording

Tristan mentioned that the characters were modelled in T Pose and kept symmetrical on axis. With this restriction asymmetry was achieved using normal map simulated deformation.  Over the course of the talk some great concept work and examples of their design process were shown.  Valve are one of the developer super powers in my opinion with their franchises gathering mass appeal across the world, they were recruiting so definitely worth contacting Tristan (I can give you an email if wish to contact him).  He outlined that the showreels/portfolios they want need to have work of quality similar to theirs in them.

Mackey McCandlish - Infinity Ward (part2)

This is the conclusion of Infinity Ward's talk, Mackey had 5 personal rules of the industry to share:

• Don't fall prey to new behaviours (new challenges) - Time constraints can easily be overlooked when experimenting.
• Find the simplest solution - When faced with a gigantic project quick fixes save time and money.
• Don't delete what is already good enough  - When you have produced something and get a sudden revelation on how to improve it do not delete the original, again time constraints do hold us back.
• The "Big Picture" outweighs the small problems - stemming from the simplest solution ethic, the little things can be overlooked and fixed quickly to save the project as a whole.
• The real work comes after the dialogue (scripting) - tweaking always takes longer than you plan it to, the general blocking of the scene lays the foundation.

A brilliant set of tips there, From experience I have seen what results of not having these rules in place on a project and deadlines get missed.  Breaking into the industry was the next topic with an emphasis on "How to approach people".  Firstly you can't afford to be shy, working on your communication skills is the way to go.  throwing yourself into uncomfortable situations and highly communicative events will desensitise you to the nerves of first meetings. If you don't put yourself out there no-one will know you, networking allows you to meet influential people and work your way up to plugging your talents after a few conversations.

An interesting point was that any interviewer will want you to do well at interview, after all they want to fill a void so sell yourself, show you're passionate and enthusiastic especially if your aiming that positivity at the company itself.  Researching the company is therefore pretty useful and being able to reference their inner workings with your proposed effect on the company could help.  In any position once you get it, you need to prove yourself and earn trust.  start at the bottom of the ladder and working your way up the ranks and it will pay off.

A strong portfolio is diverse in styles and ideas as this helps companies envisage you working on any of their projects. Game specific portfolios can contain X+A Indie Development, Game Scripting, examples of levels with engines such as Little Big Planet.  Modelling for games requires well thought out low-res geometry with texture mapping to compensate.  These portfolio's differ greatly from the film industry as their detail needs to be much greater.   After questioning Mackey on the move from film to game for an animator/ modeller he explained how it was relatively common for film industry animators to work in games however the move from games to film is much more difficult. Infinity ward were talent scouting although he did stress that being in the USA this would mean working VISA issues for us Brits so we'd have to be petty darn good for them to want us.

Still it may be worth pursuing a job with them if you have what it takes, Mackey did mention that programming experience with C++ would be preferred whichever role.  

Mackey McCandlish - Infinity Ward (part1)

Infinity Ward were represented by Mackey McCandlish, lead designer on the Call of Duty games.

Mackey Scripted many of the levels of Modern Warfare 2 which he descried as taking a god like responsibility over the final gaming experience.  Unlike with films and other linear story telling gaming can defy normal story telling conventions and throw highly contrasting levels together in very little order to disgruntle the player and maintain a range of playing experiences, keeping the player enticed.

A point Mackey made was that the publisher and developer in game production should be kept separate so as to keep creative control. Infinity ward is a subsidiary of Activision and this works for them incredibly well.  The company function's by hiring a "Super Awesome" Team. It was quite clear Mackey was scouting for talent when he listed his "Qualities in Super Awesome People". A super awesome person.....

• Instinctively knows they are personally responsible for how good the final product is.
• Will not follow orders that make the product worse and will fight their cause.
• The person doing it is the one responsible not the one who ordered it.
• Know the project is behind and will instinctively feel awful.
• will bitch to the right people if someone is negatively affecting the project.

This list was quite an intriguing window into how personally responsible the developers feel for the game.  Scheduling was the next focus of  the talk.  An interesting phrase here was "baby killing" basically the will to kill a project close to your heart however personally attached if its for the best quality or time-management wise. other points were that...

• 4o days were allocated to a task.
• each task was given a finite deadline.
• a "daily build" system was in place to keep order. 

Mackey had a great deal of info so I shall post the remaining notes in my next post.

Waking Sleeping Beauty

This isn't an Animex related post but I thought it would be good to share the"Waking Sleeping Beauty" documentary with other animators. 

The documentary follows Disney studios at a point when the next generation of animators faced the daunting task of reclaiming the Disney throne of "classic" features.  A brilliant trailer can be found here -

http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/wakingsleepingbeauty/

Hope you guys love this as much as I do.

Sandy Lin - Visceral Games

Visceral Games recently released the title "Dante's Inferno" based on "The Divine Comedy"  by Dante Alighieri and works of Gustave Dore.  Sandy Lin Worked as a VFX artist on the game creating weapon trails and other similar in-game effects. 

She explained how the colour scripts for the level design influenced the colours used in the effects to keep continuity.  The works of Wayne Barlowe were another source of inspiration for this game's look, Having to stick to the classical interpretation of Hell, this gives the game quite a unique quality amongst other similar games such as God of War.  There was not a whole lot of information in Sandy's talk however the general background of the game proved quite interesting.  Tristan Sacrimento was lead animator on the game and after a quick look at his website the guy has some brilliant work on projects such as Star Wars the Force Unleashed and Marvel's Nemesis -Rise of the Imperfects so definitely a great games animator to keep an eye out for. 

check his work out at : http://www.tristansacramento.com/

Ken Wong - Spicy Horse Studios

Ken Wong's best known for his work on the American McGee Games Franchise.  His talk focussed on the concept work created for "Alice 2" coming soon to PS3 and XBOX 360.

Spicy Horse are situated in Shanghai where a team of 70 have been working on the project for the past 2 years.  Ken explained how the difficulty of creating a game of this style is that in the east it is not common place and tends to take artists completely out of their comfort zones.  the following are important aspects of the design Ken sought after:

• Victorian/Gothic
• Visual Motif
• Steampunk
• Alchemy
• Theme
• Tone
• Colour Use
• Rendering Style

The characters, props, costume, architecture and environments all required heavy research and reference.  The goal was to achieve a unique and dark universe.  with influence from Mark Ryden of Brothers Quay as an example and Zdzislaw Beksinki's works.  Ken's "Dark" needed to have

• Corruption of Innocence
• the Edge of Ridiculous
• Abuse of Power
• Uncomfortable use of colour
• the Dark side of sex
• Impairment of senses

All of the outlined factors that contributed to the world of "Alice" are brilliant inspiration for my personal projects and I'm sure for many others so I hope this can help. The lessons learnt during this talk were that Painting and Design are different and brainstorming is vital for strong development of ideas.  I need to put more story and function into my drawings and show depth.  Frequent sketching is incredibly important to the strength of a drawing and Ken himself only moves a drawing into the concept art stage after 5 or 6 attempts in sketch form.

I am currently working on a selection of concept works for a group project so this talk by Ken was really helpful. Its a great buzz to see how a simple drawing can change entirely when studios like Spicy Horse move them into colour. 

Jim Zubkavich - Udon Entertainment

Jim Zubkavich gave an Animex talk on his digital art North American based company "Udon" who amongst other clients have worked with DC Comics, Marvel and Capcom especially with the Street Fighter franchise.

  Their works are heavily stylised digital paintings used in marketing and concept within the games/film Industry and recently printed "art of " books. His artists on payroll span the globe and for this reason has a 24 hour workforce. Jim mentioned how the obvious language barriers and distance take a toll on business relationships however the increased work flow through a 24/7 team outweighs these limitations. Examples of Udon's prints can be found through udoncrew.deviantart.com/art


Their works are predominantly although not entirely Anime in style due to the extent of the Japanese market they work with.  Jim's talk was inspiring to all of those looking for careers in the digital animation and art industries, he  explained how being persistent when approaching companies is extremely important to being known in the industry and to showing improvement in your Showreel/Portfolio.  Here are a few other key bullet points he shed light on :

• If you are dedicated you "CAN" get there.
• This chance won't be your last.
• There's no fixed point in life you will succeed at. 
• A creative job brings with it enormous fulfilment and an ever-changing outlook.   

Overall Jim's talk was exhilarating and gave me a fresh and more relaxed outlook on employment in the digital arts. His company Udon was mentioned to be looking for new artists so any budding matte painters or digital artists should apply. http://www.udonentertainment.com/blog/

I myself dabble and hope to get more experienced in the field.

David Hego - Rocksteady studios

David Hego put on a stunning visual presentation at Animex, He is the Art Director at Rocksteady and his focus in this session was Batman: Arkham Asylum.  He explained firstly how difficult it was bringing authenticity and originality to the Batman universe whilst remaining true to the licence. There have been many batman game titles over the past few decades and this game needed to break convention and set a benchmark for the studio.

A team of 40 - 65 is maintained at Rocksteady to keep up with their pipeline's demands., With a firm belief in quality over quantity the concept work is vital to creating the colourful yet dark environments in-game.  The cliche monochrome look adopted by Gears of war as an example was something the team wanted to sear clear from.  The locations needed to be:

• full of history
• feel lived in
• tainted
• contain as fewer elements as needed to maintain a P.O.F (point of focus)
• Warm versus Cool colour scheme

A Hyper Realistic visual style was achieved using semiotic imagery, highly detailed yet exaggerated fantasy visuals. The winning formula was the effect of contrasting elements in the designs (beautiful versus Ugly) that ultimately disorientate the player in their judgement.  Framing and lighting environments was key to suggesting points of interest in a scene, masking the surroundings in shadow.  With lighting swatches used between the team consistency was achieved. 

David Hego briefly presented character design sheets but very little detail was given, environments were the real focus and he mentioned influences such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet's work, director of"City of Lost Children". All in all a very nice presentation with some great imagery to look at, a real shame camera's weren't allowed really.

John Palamarchuk- Sony Santa Monica

I Managed to take a few notes of this first talk.
John Palamarchuk is from Sony and a graphics & programming graduate
his work on God of War 3 was the main focus of the presentation.

What came across was the up-scaling of level sizes from previous instalments of the game. 2 full time environment designers worked on this game with part time and freelance artists hired at vital points in production.
6 months was given to produce a single level solely to 1 full-time designer, this included programming, modelling and lighting responsibility's.

All Animation was Maya based and Modelling seemed to be Zbrush and Maya.  The Kratos rig has a rimlight shader and attached lighting that can be keyed on for added control on the character individually. A lot of hassle was had with "Titan" characters as levels in themselves, making computers run incredibly slowly and take up to 12 hours to simply load in a Maya scene. These kind of constraints make what they have accomplished incredible. God of War 3 was the first in which the trailer was not outsourced but made in-house, this was previewed in the presentation and shown from blocking to finalised procedural render.  It's a really nice looking game with what seems like a team of strong generalist 3D designers so any newly qualified games orientated people should definitely take a shot at applying to them for work.

View the in-house trailer for God of War 3 here-
http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2010/02/12/god-of-war-iii-new-trailer-revealed/

Animex 2010

Here is another key reason to begin this blog, to note down the incredible amount of information I took from the talks and workshops held at Animex 2010.  It's probably best to spread these notes over a few days in separate posts for some kind of order.  Both Games Industry and Film professionals attended so there's quite a lot of diverse Information.

Games Based-

• John Palamarchuk - Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
• David Hego - Rocksteady Studios
• Jim Zubkavich - Udon Entertainment
• Ken Wong - Spicy Horse
• Sandy Lin - Visceral Games
• Mackey McCandlish - Infinity Ward
• Tristan Reidford - Valve
• Eric Baldwin - Naughty Dog
• Jim Gentile - Midway
• Scott Campbell - Double Fine

Animation/Film Based-

• Stuart Sumida - Skeletal Rigging (Biologist)
• Paul Wells - Author
• Phil Shoebottom - Realtime:UK
• Hans Rijpkema - Rhythm and Hues
• Tripp Hudson - Framestore
• Michael Defeo - Blue Sky Studios
• Andrew Shmidt - Pixar

I happen to have my mugshot on the Animex website after a photographer dropped by the Stuart Sumida Workshop. I had no idea but quite fun.

2009

I have decided to now venture into the universe of "blogs"
After experiencing the wonder of how other great animators and designers are using blogspot to share their knowledge and work i felt it was about time I did too.
so here it is my first post, i shall use this to briefly sum up the past year, in which i....

• Graduated in Animation Design 
• Worked with RJDM (www.rjdm.com)
• Worked on the ever growing Showreel

In November I had the great fortune of meeting with Richard Williams and attending his master class.

Richard William's wisdom in animation is beyond anyone I've ever met before, a short time spent in his company flooded page upon page with technical notes and tips. I only hope some of it sinks in and shows in the work i produce.

now its the new year, bringing with it plenty of challenges and goals to conquer.