Killing Central

We had to make a short camera fly through to serve as a "Lose" version of the Base Assault cinematic.  I took a few stills from a rough camera pass and sketched in a few possible poses and locations for the fallen.

The final version required me to add, and pose a dead Central laying against a wall.  Kind of hard to see, but those dead bodies are sprinkled all over the background destruction.

Motion Capture

 Motion capture can be a touchy subject with animators, but sometimes necessary in tight production schedules.  Especially in the video game industry.  Here is a case where some animation skill went into cleaning up all the movements and in some cases adding new motion to an existing chunk of mocap data.  The facial animation was hand keyed and the end result is pretty fun in context.

Here are a few shots I worked on from the "Base Assault" cinematic in XCOM: Enemy Within. 

Make those In-Game Animations Shine

Much more goes into a game than just cool cinematics.  No experienced game developer will argue that point.  However, tight deadlines and huge amounts of assets that need to move doesn't have to equate to ugly game animation.  I agree that players spend most of their time running around in the actual game environment, but you want that experience to be a good one.  If a player loves how it looks and feels to move around in the game, and has characters and environmental cues that move in ways that heightens the experience, they will probably spend more time and money playing.

Here are a few samples of animations done for those in-game assets.

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:

Finding the EPIC in Everything

Setting out to make a game like XCOM: Enemy Unknown is, by definition, an EPIC experience!  This has certainly proven true for those of us on the art production and animation side.

I am of the opinion that if you set out to do something then you should really DO IT! No matter what that something is. This is just a taste of the fun that can happen when you try to take something just a little further than expected.

Every Good Containment Cinematic has a good Animation Test

Some of the fun animators get to have involves figuring out interesting movements that accurately reflect a character and their personality.  A lot of fun exploration, and reference collecting is part of trying to figure this out.  The beauty of the playblast is that it's a great opportunity to test cinematography, animation ideas, and see if everything plays in the environment the way you want.  The end result hopefully being something rewarding and entertaining for the player to watch.

Here is a playblast of an animation I did for the Muton's Containment cinematic.  I was trying to make him feel aggressive, and show how eager he is to escape and destroy something.

Playblast for Muton:




Playblast for Sectoid:



Playblast for Elder:

--Coming Soon--