Time for a bit unusual post, because.. why not :) !
Over a week ago I've attended a game part of Bradford Animation Festival. Suprisingly, it was way more fun than I've expected it to be (last year BAF was dragging and I felt asleep couple times during talks.. ups!) and I'm definately going next year (I might again skip the animation bit of festival. Unless they'll have LAIKA and
Boxtrolls. Or someone from Dreamworks talking about
HTTYD 2. Yup, wishful thinking;)). Since I've posted a very detailed review on my college blog (
day 1 and
day 2), I'm not going to repeat myself and just paste few really good bits that happened.
Day 1:
Steve Lycett - SUMO Digital - worked on many titles, including
Split Second and various SEGA games. His latest project was
Katsuma Unleashed
- a handheld game that he and his team were able to produce in just
over 7 months. Steve talked a lot about pre-production of this title and
showed us WIP gameplay, animation tests for different characters, intro
video.Another game presented was
Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed.
This one took 3 years to make and was quite challenging - everything
had to be animated and each environment unique and interesting.
Karl Abson - lecturer at Bradford University, talked about
techniques of animal motion capture. He also talked about the uses of
mo-cap and difficulties of working with animals - in his case, with
horses. Although it's a very hard and time consuming process, the
effects produced during session are far better and more
realistic/believable than when animated by key framing (mo-cap is a data
driven animation). iKinema was another thing metioned during this talk -
it's a plugin for Maya that allows a real time skeleton mapping with
mo-cap session.
Day 2:
FuturLab talk about production process for
Velocity 2X was reaaally good. I literally can't wait for this indie game to finally come out on PS4 :)!
Viktor Antonow - design director at ZeniMax Media. Viktor talked a lot about the cities and the role of concept art in game production (
Dishonored).
He showed us a lot of great pieces of art, his own as well as Utopian
architectural designs, which are great inspiration for sci-fi art. He
also talked about Dishonored art and inspiration from cities like London
and Edinburgh.
Brian Horton - senior art director - Crystal Dynamics - worked on major franchises (
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Batman, Star Wars). Brian talked about his challenge when working on Lara Croft from
Tomb Raider series, a very popular game character. His task was to bring back the
Tomb Raider
brand and make it interesting again. He talked us through his though
process and what he wanted to achive in a newest game with young Lara
Croft.
+awesome stuff from Kevin Carthew (Team17)
Oh and that thing below...
Possibly my fav photo, taked during Phil Gray (from TT games) presentation of new LEGO game:
LEGO Marvel Superheroes. How many sleeping beauties can you spot ;)?
