MECs Away!!!

There were a lot of fun animations to do during development of the expansion "XCOM: Enemy Within."  A personal favorite are the MEC animations I did for the leap out of the DropShip.  I did an early playblast with static cameras to try and figure out some fun things we could do to make the MEC's leap really epic. I really wanted this heavy, armored up hulk of a soldier to have a heroic entrance. Our cinematic lead, Andrew Currie, liked the ideas and did a great camera pass on these.

Watch the playblast, and final renders here:

Cry Me a River at the Deluge

I've been pretty excited to hear people's reactions to the "Deluge" cinematic.  The character of "Annette Durans" was pretty fun to work into our game.  Her character gave us an opportunity for a fun cinematic that had more story behind it than we usually get to do.  Almost immediately following the release of "XCOM: Enemy Unknown" I had the chance to pitch my ideas for what the flow of this cinematic would be, and had fun thinking of how we could craft something special for the player that took into account a lot of Dave Black's art direction goals.  Remember, your original mission is simply to retrieve a weapon.  Really playing up the human ramifications of the mission, and making a surprise twist out of your mission's goal, was an attempt at creating greater depth and seeing how the creation of character lore could positively impact our game.  Dave Black (art director) and Scott Whitbecker (writter) had written most of the narrative for Annette's back-story and how she became the "weapon" we were sent to recover.  The fun was helping him figure out how to best show those ideas.  The fact that the map is called "Deluge" and involves so much water and fighting did impact my ideas about how Annette reacts to being found.  Imagine a caged rat and you get my drift.  The concept of "flooding" occurred to me as appropriate.  The whole outpouring of emotion from this person that has been caged up was interesting to me.  Especially when you pair that with psionic abilities that she doesn't have a firm grip on.  Very X-Men in many ways.  The animation team in general had fun executing this one, and hopefully it shows.

Here is the full cinematic, and playblasts from shots I actually worked on: