Character Dialogue Overall I feel this project was perhaps my strongest allowing me prioritise facial and lip-sync animation above body mechanics to produce a character driven piece that focuses on some subtle details to convey the desired emotions. Throughout the course of this project the greatest learning curve has been understanding lip-sync workflow and facial animation and I believe I have taken great strides in further understanding this process. Whilst I still have much to...
The final company on this list is Quantic Dream who have in recent years revolutionised the video games industry through their belief in motion capture technology to deliver the same engaging, narrative experience of movies through the video game medium. Founded in Paris, 1997 by industry luminary David Cage, they have pursued their own unique take on video games focusing on interactive storytelling that evolves the entire narrative based on the player's decisions. But their...
The infamous Rockstar North, established in 1988 in Edinburgh, are best known for their creation of the Grand Theft Auto franchise one of the best-selling and arguably one of the most successful games ever created both in terms of game design and aesthetic qualities. Their games are often very character driven creating some of the most believable and interesting personalities within the video game medium through the clever use of animation and motion capture performance....
Similarly to Media Molecule, thatgamecompany were recently founded in 2006 in Los Angeles and focus on producing small game titles that attempt to invoke emotional responses from players rather than strive for high production, high risk games like Creative Assembly and Rocksteady. They remain an independent company, not tied to any specific publisher or owner which means their creative drive comes from within the company of just a handful of members. Such freedom has allowed...
Another studio based in the UK, Media Molecule are relatively new being formed in 2006 from former Lionhead employees and releasing its first game in 2008 - Little Big Planet. Despite being their first game Little Big Planet has been heralded as a monumental success for video games pushing the idea of user generated content for gamers to a whole new level. This combined with the games unique aesthetic style, went on to win dozens...
The video games industry is full of creative and innovative teams that are passionate about their products but a few stand out more than some as companies I would like to be a part of. One of these is the Creative Assembly established in 1987 in West Sussex they rose to fame with their original title Shogun: Total War, a historical war game still considered to be a milestone within the strategy game genre. In...
Along with my animations I also submitted my human head rig as well and managed to get some really good feedback on the areas that are working well and those that need most improvement. Overall though its working as well as I expected, the basics are all in and generally the deformations work cleanly with minimal mess. There are however a few key pieces that need further work that were commented on during my first...
In preparation for my dialogue animation piece I decided to create a set of phoneme shapes ready for the lip-sync part of the animation. After watching David Latour's demos I found his style of animation was really effective for lip sync - an area I have always struggled with before. Essentially you create each phoneme shape you anticipate using then using the pose2shelf script save that shape to the Maya shelf allowing you to easily...
For our first submital I decided to rough out some poses and basic shapes I would like to use in my character performance piece and whilst its still very rough, you do get an idea of where I want to go with the character and the acting in general. Some of the main feedback I got was where the character should be looking and who the character is talking to. My original idea was to...
First submittal is very soon so I decided to render out my animations and compile them together in Adobe premiere to show them to the tutors. All the animations are still work in progress but as you will be able to tell, some more so than others. Overall, I am fairly happy with the timings but I feel the poses on a few of them can still be tightened up, so in the next few...
