Colin Graham - Director of Animation
Are we ready for animation on the new generation of consoles?
The PS4 has extra power - 25 million polygons - it was a huge development, becoming the next stage in gaming and animation. More space in the next generation consoles, PS4 and Xbox One with 150 - 200 MB, compared to PS3 and Xbox 360 with only 20 - 40 MB in animation memory. Memory is vital, more than likely the animation with in the game has to be cut down due to it not fitting with the memory quota, meaning all the time the animators spent on the animation was all for nothing. However with the new generation, there is more space for a variety of animation, with less compression, it requires better animation quality.
Is your Pipeline ready to double, triple or quadruple your output?
The budgets increase! Meaning more animation, with a group of 10 to 20 animators for the game animation and the production management becomes bottle neck. Its a numbers game, with 4000+ animations on Aiden Pearce and half of which are for the cover system, 4000+ animation on enemy AI, and 5000+ animations of the living city which mainly used motion capture with a 98 mocap session. This took 5 years including the conception and making.
Are we ready for animation on the new generation of consoles?
The PS4 has extra power - 25 million polygons - it was a huge development, becoming the next stage in gaming and animation. More space in the next generation consoles, PS4 and Xbox One with 150 - 200 MB, compared to PS3 and Xbox 360 with only 20 - 40 MB in animation memory. Memory is vital, more than likely the animation with in the game has to be cut down due to it not fitting with the memory quota, meaning all the time the animators spent on the animation was all for nothing. However with the new generation, there is more space for a variety of animation, with less compression, it requires better animation quality.
Is your Pipeline ready to double, triple or quadruple your output?
The budgets increase! Meaning more animation, with a group of 10 to 20 animators for the game animation and the production management becomes bottle neck. Its a numbers game, with 4000+ animations on Aiden Pearce and half of which are for the cover system, 4000+ animation on enemy AI, and 5000+ animations of the living city which mainly used motion capture with a 98 mocap session. This took 5 years including the conception and making.
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Ubisoft Montreal has over 3000 employees, with the core brands being Assassins Creed, Far Cry and Watch Dogs, and contains the main motion capture studio; Ubisoft Toronto manages the motion capture.
Watch Dogs:
- Named Project Nexus
- A new IP
- Initial core team comes from Far Cry 2 and Naruto
- Grew to include developers form Assassins Creed and Splinter Cell
- Break through stage gate process - Prototype for game play
- Initial game play prototypes focused on running and driving
- Initial break through was hacking
- Break through stage gate process - Prototype for game play
- Initial game play prototypes focused on running and driving
- Initial break through was hacking
They kept the development of Watch Dogs a secret even amongst Ubisoft as they have a habit of leaking information among themselves.
By putting the demo together, everyone realised that this is what they wanted; everyone had different ideas so it was amazing at 2013 E3 when viewers loved it.
They needed someone who had experience, had a good sense of what they needed to capture. They hired a parkour cop, Sebastien Rouleau, who was retrained to fit the movements as the hollywood style is different to real life. - Needed to change the context around them, with over 98 motion cap shots, the poses needed to be natural. As they shot the footage, they worked backwards, designing the movements with Sebastien in mind.
Small things such as putting hands in pockets, which is difficult to model and animate, to save time they put the finger length to 0 so that it would create the illusion of his hands being in his pockets.
Small things such as putting hands in pockets, which is difficult to model and animate, to save time they put the finger length to 0 so that it would create the illusion of his hands being in his pockets.
Technology advancements helped to get the personality of the characters, they are able to stick to iconic stances that are recognizable. 'Ninja tasks' - looking at risk assessments in which they end up doing things with out telling the producers so that it cant be cut so you sometimes have to bend the rules, however if you fail, you lose your credibility.
DLC Bad Blood
T-Bone character who owns a junkyard - needed a new costume, a new weapon - secondary action - nice movement to make it aesthetically pleasing. Coded in the bag pack to move away to the wall when covering. To fit the bag pack in these stances, they scaled down the melee weapon slightly so that it worked with the characters movement.
DLC Bad Blood
T-Bone character who owns a junkyard - needed a new costume, a new weapon - secondary action - nice movement to make it aesthetically pleasing. Coded in the bag pack to move away to the wall when covering. To fit the bag pack in these stances, they scaled down the melee weapon slightly so that it worked with the characters movement.
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