The Witcher 2 Deep-Dive Roundtable Interview Part 1. Dead Island. Scotland’s Axis Animation specializes in creating high impact video game cinematics. In the trailer for Dead Island, zombies attack a family during a dream vacation that goes horribly wrong. In this trailer, Axis Animation created a story-driven short that quickly went viral. Find out how Houdini was used to create all the mayhem and gore. Nicholas Pliatsikas, Sergio Caires and Stu Aitken from Axis Animation have been kind enough to share their story with us. They have broken down their work in great detail with a focus on how they used Houdini to render the trailer using Mantra while creating effects such as shattered glass, splattered blood, and stylized hair.
They also talk about an innovative facial rigging system created in Houdini to help add emotion to the traumatized characters. Dead Island from axisanimation on Vimeo. Q. A. Q. A. The axe hit that decapitates the zombie bellhop was an interesting challenge. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Visit the offical site for Dead Island. Interview :: Dragon Age: Origins. Released in December of 2009, Dragon Age: Origins is a dark fantasy RPG created by BioWare as the spiritual successor to their famous Baldur’s Gate series. By creating their own original world and rules system for the game, BioWare was able to break entirely new ground, telling the story exactly as they wish and in the manner they feel gives the best effect. There is no doubt about the success of this approach! DA:O has received some of the highest aggregate review scores of any RPG on any platform. It also received numerous top honors including IGN’s “PC Game of the Year (2009)” and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Science’s “Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year 2009”.
Not content to rest on their laurels, the team jumped immediately into creating expansions and other downloadable content for the game. In this interview we had the opportunity to speak with the art team that created the amazing characters and creatures in DA:O. Enjoy! Fable 3. © Microsoft Corporation. Each outfit consisting of jacket, trousers/skirt, shoes/boots, gloves and hat. That works out as 784 possible shoe and trouser combinations for the Hero alone. All these combinations needed to be tested and then fixed if there were gaps or clipping problems. Then if you take into account trousers/skirts working properly with jackets, gloves working correctly with jackets and jacket collars working correctly with hats, you're looking at over 3,000 possible clothing combinations that all needed to be checked and fixed. Then there was another 3,000+ combinations of clothing to check and fix for the Heroines outfits.
Much respect to you James Vale; very few developers are able to do, or would even want to do, your job. The place is misty, colors are fairly desaturated and limited. Not only does James Vale have to wear two hats, but the poor guy also has to deal with huge problems that arise during development. ALAN WAKE. Traveling to America's Pacific Northwest, taking close to 60,000 photo references and camping out in the woods at night to record ambient noises that would otherwise be down right frightening is the kind of R&D that Remedy Entertainment committed to when developing Alan Wake.
CGSociety has a chat with Remedy's managing director Matias Myllyrinne on the development and direction of Alan Wake. Even before anyone even knew what it was about, Alan Wake started getting insane amounts of praise beginning with the ovation that the first ever trailer received at the 2009 E3. Finnish game developers Remedy Entertainment, the creators of Max Payne, have diverted from developing the familiar city dwelling environments of Max Payne to a project with much more organic environments in Alan Wake.
FEEL First step was to determine a clear direction for the game in order to establish the 'feel' of the whole project. Dante's Inferno. Technology Everyone’s favorite Autodesk tool, Maya, is what brought it all together. Also, it should come as no surprise that not much of anything in Dante’s Inferno was motion captured at all. Most of the NPCs are all concept creature rigs rather than typical humanoid rigs. “Our primary authoring tool for animation and rigging was Maya and a lion’s share of it was hand-keyed,” says Huang. “A lot of our paired finishing moves, giant bosses, and Dante’s combat animations required the keen eye and deft touch of an animator.
We also went pretty over the top in some of the combat moves so doing things like motion capture wouldn’t have served us. Visceral pulled in plenty of outside help to put Dante together. Not many console titles run at a steady 60 frames per second anymore; at least not since the previous generation of consoles. Interview -- Mass Effect 2. Electronic Arts has been on quite a roll lately with some huge titles like Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Army of Two. All of these games have really pushed the boundaries of graphics on the PC and consoles -- visually they are quite simply a feast for the eyes.
A couple months ago, we were proud to provide an interview with the team behind Army of Two: The 40th Day. Now it is our distinct pleasure to follow that up with one for the highly acclaimed Mass Effect 2! ME2 is quite literally the best-reviewed RPG of all time -- receiving that distinction on both the PC and Xbox 360 platforms. Many thanks to the Mass Effect 2 art team for spending so much time providing great answers to our many questions! Uncharted 2: Among Thieves art work. Epic Games - Gears of War 2. Avatar. Blizzard's Warcraft - The Night Elf. Here is the long awaited tute on her eyes. When rendering something like a human face, it's still more a task of using my observation skills and there is much less depending on the software itself to give me that pleasing render.
When I started making material for the Elf's eyeballs, I looked at a great many photographs with similar lighting conditions to that which I used in my scene, so I’d already imagined what the final result should look like. I made the material for the eyes reflective, but not too much so. Just enough so it would only pick up the strongest light sources and not reflect everything in the scene. I placed some small light-emitting objects right in front of the eyes, so they did not effect the overall scene lighting, to simulate some partially obscured light in front of her face. For a better close-up, it’s probably a better idea to use a light-emitting image for some more believable details. Here is a picture of the light-emitting objects in the scene.
Batman Arkham Asylum. On the art side our process began with us scouring the graphic novels for inspiration. We looked at the Batman comics down through the decades paying close attention to the Arkham specific books like the beautiful 'Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth', and 'Arkham Asylum: Living Hell'. Arkham had never been visualised in its entirety before so the environment team had the big challenge of creating every nook and cranny of the island for the first time. Arkham Asylum is an amazing place to set a Batman game.
It gave us not only an environment, that from a technical and game play standpoint was suited to our design, being of a finite, contained size with believable borders, but it also gave us a setting so rich in creepy, foreboding atmosphere that it was an artist's dream location. Rocksteady Studio was opened in 2004. The company is based in Highgate, North London in a converted factory, purpose-built for making games.
How To Train Your Dragon. Features - The Secrets Of Cloth Simulation In Alan Wake. [Remedy animation programmer Henrik Enqvist takes a look at how the team created a believable tweed cloth simulation on the title character's jacket in the Microsoft-published Xbox 360 exclusive horror-thriller Alan Wake.] The main character in our action thriller is Alan Wake, a writer who gets trapped in a nightmarish scenario where he is forced to fight dark forces while trying to solve the mystery of his missing wife. He is not a well-trained action hero, but rather an everyday guy.
To establish his character our art director wanted him to wear an old tweed jacket with arm patches. As the game takes place in a real-world setting, the tools for giving characters personality are limited, compared to a fantasy game or a space shooter. Therefore the clothes that our characters wear become far more important. Alan Wake's jacket had to be as believable as possible to maintain the illusion of a thriller atmosphere to the player. Figure 1. Figure 2.
Figure 3. Robh Ruppel. College Boss Films thrived and Robh also freelanced in Los Angeles, working on the movie 'Misery' with Rob Reiner and Norman Garwood. He also went back to the Art Center College, where he crossed over and did some teaching on their invitation. "They wanted an additional teacher for the landscape class and I taught that for several terms and then I said, 'Hey why don't we start doing this on laptops, because most of these students are going to be working digital anyway', and from then on we went out into the field and painted on our laptops, from life.
" Ruppel had turned his class into a digital landscape painting session. Robh also found figure drawing education at the California Art Institute, run by Fred Fixler. This is where he met Morgan Weistling, Greg Pro and Glen Orbik and others. Form and structure life drawing, half tones, light and shadow oozed from that class and both students gathered a great deal of knowledge. Meet Meline' The character at that stage didn't even have a name, but soon enough, there were enough interesting actions for her to do, to fill a very full five minute short film.
"We had already done some early character and set designs, the story was quite intense already; so we suggested something that would later take two whole years of our lives," says Sebastien. The couple had so many ideas. They started to write them on paper. "I remember one thing that I really enjoyed doing," explains Sebastien, "We started to mime the little girl in our bedroom.
I was pitching 'She could look down for a second, then she looks up, freaks out and starts running! ' while physically doing what I was saying. Virginie, that was watching me -- with another point of view -- then took my place and said 'What if instead of that action, she directly goes there! ' In no time at all, the collection of ideas were piling up. Real-Time Rendering · More on God of War III Antialiasing.
Since my recent post discussing the antialiasing method used in God of War III, Cedric Perthuis (a graphics programmer on the God of War III development team) was kind enough to email some additional details on how the technique was developed, which I will quote here: “It was extremely expensive at first. The first not so naive SPU version, which was considered decent, was taking more than 120 ms, at which point, we had decided to pass on the technique. It quickly went down to 80 and then 60 ms when some kind of bottleneck was reached. Our worst scene remained at 60ms for a very long time, but simpler scenes got cheaper and cheaper. “For a long time we worked with a reference code, algorithm changes were made in the reference code and in parallel the optimized code was being optimized further. the optimized version never deviated from the reference code.
Animation Mentor Newsletter - May 2010. AVATAR - Aymeric Auté (Prime Focus) Tout le monde dans la salle a forcément prit le temps d'aller voir au moins une fois la dernière poule aux œufs d'or de James Cameron, le très attendu Avatar. En plus d'un tour de force côté Box Office, (puisqu'en à peine un mois, il a déjà battu son propre record détenu jusque là par Titanic), les moyens mis en œuvre sur ce projet dépassent de loin tout ce qui a pu être créé à ce jour dans l'industrie du cinéma. Nous pouvons recenser tout d'abord la mise au point de la fameuse caméra Stéréoscopique utilisée pour la première fois sur Voyage au Centre de la Terre, mais c'est surtout d'un point de vue 3d, capture de mouvements, intégration et prévisualisation que réside l'une des principales performance du film.
Les deux vidéos ci-dessous vous permettront de mieux comprendre l'ampleur et le potentiel des outils développés sur cette production. Sur cette production, James Cameron ouvre le bal de ce que seront les outils des réalisateurs de demain. Interview: Digic Studios on the Assassin's Creed Cinematic. A while back we had the great pleasure to interview Digic Pictures after the release of their triumphant Warhammer: Mark of Chaos cinematic. Not a company to rest on their laurels, they've been quite busy ever since. After the release of their newest trailer -- this time for the hotly anticipated Assassin's Creed 2 -- we knew that another interview was in order. Although extremely busy these days, they kindly consented to share a great deal of information about themselves and their work -- not to mention some artwork that you're unlikely to see anyplace else!
(Click all images to see full-sized version.) Last time we interviewed you was when your Warhammer cinematic came out.***12288; What has developed since then? ***12288; What projects have you worked on and how has your company grown? We often see people asking at ZBC what software packages they should focus on when learning their craft.***12288; What advice would you give? Maya / Mudbox: Making of Varga | CG Sharpe. Interview with Alex Alvarez | The Gnomon Workshop. By: Travis Bourbeau Suits vs. Shirts, or Business vs. Creative types. It was 118 degrees with no air conditioning. There were a bunch of artists from games, film, and fine-art soaking wet in the middle of the desert with nothing to drink but Red Bull when I first met Alex Alvarez.
I was a studio partner holding a workshop in Austin, Texas and fully expected to meet an entrepreneur or “CEO” type in a business suit. You know the type that tries to “fit in with the artist”. With the release of his Master Class, an advanced 3D Creature Development course based on his Gnomon School class for certificate students, I wanted to sit down and gather some thoughts on Alex’s experiences over the past thirteen years building companies by artists, for artists. GW: Have you ever played with fire?
AA: Haha. GW: Were you artistic at an early age? AA: I was really into drawing as a kid… When I was in 2nd grade (seven years old) my teacher told my parents to put me in art classes, which they did. Zack Petroc Studios. Gears2 Environment Art (step by step page 5) The Area :: Tutorial :: “Bailarina Bellísima” How To Train Your Dragon. The Area :: Behind the Screenz. ALAN WAKE. Facial Rigging in 3ds max with Luis San Juan.