A Nictitating WHAT???

Time for a brief lesson in Sectoid eye physiology.  These creepy, grey skinned horrors look upon the world through huge alien eyes that neither move or have pupils.  Giant, shiny orbs possessing a translucent third eyelid.  Who knows what goes on in their minds?  When they point their heads in your direction, rest assured, they DO see you. 

Here is a blink animation I made while trying to figure out how this third eyelid would work:

I Could Hardly Contain Myself

Alien Containment was one of my babies in this game.  At least as far as the Muton, Sectoid, and Ethereal are concerned.  This was a rare opportunity to do some hand-keyed creature animation that could be presented with a cinematic flare.  What fun!  The turn around on these animations was insanely fast, but I can say with a smile that the monstrous effort was worth it.  The ideas for what each character would be doing had to be simple given the time frame, but also be rewarding to watch.  I didn't want to phone these in, and was imagining some XCOM fan at the tail end of a grueling mission wanting to interrogate this live alien they just acquired.  The moment needed to be satisfying and special.

Here are some play blasts of my animation ideas:




Here are the final containment animations I did in context:



After animation was done a lot of love was added via the Base modeling team, and our Cinematics Lead.  Just the right level of sweetness in my opinion.

It's always important, especially when you have no time, to focus on the important storytelling moments you want to hit and focus on those.  You can be the judge of whether I did a good job or not, but the intention was to get across the caged animal aspect of alien containment, show the characters personalities, and show in a non-gratuitous way the finality of the aliens situation.  This is their last stop before the autopsy table after all.

Ready...Aim...FIRE!!!

One enjoyable aspect of my production life on XCOM: Enemy Unknown was the teams need for cinematic ideas.  This ranged from large Tentpole cinematics to simpler moments when you're in the XCOM Base and something interesting happens.  Pitching ideas is always fun for the team, and every once and a while I had the time to pre-vis a rough story board for one of these.

Here is an example from when a player first gets his/her Laser and Plasma weapons:

A very simple illustration of new tech the player just acquired, and an attempt at making that moment feel rewarding.  Some of these ideas stuck and ended up in the final game.  The camera placement, and decisions on what each character is doing during the shots is obviously fleshed out later.

I'm a huge fan of taking the time to explore ideas cheaply before any real time is committed to modeling, animating, etc.  You don't get much cheaper than storyboards considering how quick and easy it is to iterate on any given idea.