Business: Industry review

As a part of the business studies module I also have to do an industry review on five companies I'd like to work for. So this is basically a list of games developers that I admire for various reasons as I'd really like to go into the games industry when I finish uni. It's by no means a comprehensive list as there are dozens of companies out there producing amazing work that I admire.

Rockstar North
Rockstar has studios worldwide, however the studio I'm talking about specifically is the one based in Edinburgh. An animator from Rockstar came in to give us a guest lecture in our second year and that's what sparked my interest in the company. I haven't played many of their games due to being too young when a lot of them were released, but I'm enjoying Red Dead Redemption and am looking forward to the new GTA.

Ubisoft Reflections
Again Ubisoft have studios worldwide, but it is their Reflections studio based in Newcastle that I'm interested in at the present. What I find impressive about Ubisoft's workflow is the fact that their studios collaborate on a game simultaneously, which must take a lot of work and organisation. This is how they produced the majority of the games in the Assassin's Creed series, one of my favourite series of current gen games. The same strategy is being used to produce one of their latest titles, Watch Dogs, which from the current trailers and gameplay footage is shaping up to be something pretty exciting. However it's not these games, but the original Rayman that initiated my interest in the studio, as it is one of my favourite childhood games.

Media Molecule
I wasn't expecting to love the LittleBigPlanet games half as much as I did, but they drew me in with their charm and addictive gameplay. Based in Guildford, Media Molecule has the appearance and ideology of a small, friendly company despite producing such a bestselling series. They are currently working on a game called Tearaway, amongst other projects, which looks to be as innovative as LittleBigPlanet.

Valve
Valve is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, and is possibly my favourite developer on this list. In my opinion they've never released a bad title and the games Portal, Half Life, Team Fortress 2 to name but a few are amongst my all-time favourites. The reason for the level of quality found in their games can be attributed to Valve's artistic integrity, they will never compromise on quality even if it means pushing back a game's release date because they are committed to the end product. The company is also responsible for creating the Steam digital distribution system, which allows users worldwide to purchase games from a wide catalogue, from the latest AAA title to an independently produced game from smaller studios.

Naughty Dog
Based in Santa Monica, California, Naughty Dog are responsible for creating two series that I cherish from my childhood, namely Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter. What I admire most about the company is that they recognise when it's time to move on to a new IP. Each series they've worked on only has a few games made before they move onto something fresh. It's this dedication to quality rather than profit that I find inspiring, as Naughty Dog could have continued to profit off of the Uncharted series by making more games and relying on the series' reputation to sell more units, however instead they chose to focus on making another new IP. This new game, The Last Of Us, is due out this year and judging by the trailers and behind the scenes footage released thus far it seems set to follow in the footsteps of the company's past games in terms of quality.

Production: Summary

The work I did for the pre production module feeds directly into the production module I'll be focusing on until the end of the year. Since most of my posts with be about this module I figured it would be a good idea to post a brief summary first to explain what I'm working on.

Production, or major project as the module is sometimes called, is a submission consisting of four main components. Two of these components must be collaborative projects with other students or industry, and each one is usually specific to the student's chosen pathway. For example, a modeler might model and texture a character as one project, and an animator may choose to rig a character or produce a piece of animation as one project's worth of work.

For my major project work I'm producing three pieces of collaborative work on the game Echoes with my classmates, and one personal project.

Creative Creature
This project consists of 15-20 seconds of animation to be used in game on the dragon character created by Ruth Beresford and rigged by Joe Hornsby.

Bodymechanics
Again this project is 15-20 of game animations, this time for the fae and centaur characters made by Dean Paupe and rigged by Joe and Matt Watson respectively.

Advanced Lighting
For this project I am lighting two scenes in Maya for use as game cinematics using environments created by Ruth and animations provided by Hollie Sheppard.

Double Acted
For my personal project I have taken a 15 second sound clip and I am animating a small scene between two characters to the dialogue.

Business: CV, cover letter, business card

As part of our business module we had to produce a business card, CV and covering letter. Unfortunately I spent a little too much time on the writing part and not enough on the design. The content is there now at least, but I'll definitely be working on the design a whole lot more before I send these out to any potential employers.

The purpose of the business card is to act as a handshake and introduce ourselves to an employer whilst showing our skills and personality. I chose the colour blue as it is my favourite and is often viewed as a calming colour. Instead of using a render of a still I instead chose to use an animation thumbnail as the main focal point of the front of my business card. My reason for this is that I didn't want to be mistaken for a modeler or a rigger, despite the fact that my area of expertise is stated on the card, it is the image that most people will look at first. I didn't really know what to do for the back which is why it looks so plain, so I'll definitely be rethinking that aspect of the design.

 

As I spent too long on the the writing I didn't give much thought to the design of the CV and covering letter. I made them match the business card in terms of colour scheme and the use of thumbnail drawings, but I didn't give much thought to the layout which is fairly boring as a result. I think that this is the design element that needs the most change, so at some point I'll be reworking these a lot to make them more interesting and stand out.

Pre-Production

This is some of the work I did for our pre production module. The aim of the module is to do all of the research and preparation needed for major project so that when we get to production we can just get on with the work without worrying about not having the reference material required. I didn't do very well in this project, partly because I haven't been practicing my drawing skills and I have difficulty with time management, and partly due to personal circumstances. That said, I found the project useful as it highlighted some areas that I'm lacking in, so I can work to improve on those.

Spec Anim 2

For Spec Anim 2 we were given the choice of two projects. The first was a lighting/matchmoving/animation project in which students were instructed to film a background plate, use a light probe to gather the appropriate lighting information for the scene, and animate a short piece to then be composited realistically into the scene with lighting. The second project was an exercise in usage and implementation of the Unity game engine, and this is the project I chose to do. In hindsight I would have chosen the other project as it was handled a lot better, however I learnt a lot about using Unity so at least I now have some basic knowledge of how to import my animations into a game engine.

As I mentioned there were a lot of problems with this project, the brief wasn't finalised until fairly late on and it was unclear at times what we we meant to be doing. One thing that was clear was that an outcome of the project was to import assets into Unity and create working scripts. I fulfilled this aspect of the brief by using the mecanim animation system and altering the animation trees, and by using a visual scripting tool to set up a simple puzzle.

Below I've included a brief explanation of the work I undertook and a screenshot to show the outcome. Overall I enjoyed this project as I had to discover a lot about the program myself, however I also found it stressful because of this.

The two levels in the game were created using the terrain editor and the first has been populated with found models and materials as seen above.

I attempted to import animations onto a mecanim compatible model and used a script off the net to try and get it to work. However the model would not move off the spot, so for the finished scene I used a mecanim system that was already set up and altered the blend tree and script so that they would be compatible with the model. The image above shows the jump animation activated on the mecanim animation tree when the player jumps in-game.

The puzzles in the game have been coded visually using PlayMaker to set up Finite State Machines. I managed to do all of this by experimentation, and the final puzzles will only work in sequence with no known errors. The FSM shown above depicts the object's flow of states, currently it's collider has been triggered by the player and by interacting as needed the next state will be activated.

Finally, the second level contains a simple particle system set up to replicate the appearance of snow.

Spec Anim 1

This is the finished reel of work from my first project of the year. In Spec Anim 1 we had to learn to animate in Maya and in MotionBuilder in three weeks. I started using Maya at the end of second year for my major project work, but this is the first time we'd been taught how to use it properly. I wouldn't say it's any harder than animating in Max, there are aspects of both programs that I prefer, though generally I find the UI in Max to be more user friendly. Maya seems to have more options for animating though, so I'm glad I got to grips with it more in this project as I'll be using it for the rest of third year.

We only had a week to learn MotionBuilder which I don't think was enough time to understand most of the program. But I managed to blend some mocap clips and animate my own section in that time, so it's a good basis of knowledge if I need to use it in the future.

I'm more happy with some parts than others. All in all though I wish I'd spent more time on each stage of the project.

In week one the task was to animate two balls of differing weights (a tennis ball and a cannon ball) bouncing down a set of stairs and around an obstacle course.

For week two I had to create a simple walking ball rig and animate a walk.

And in week three I blended a set of clips in MotionBuilder and animated a section with added character

I'm not too happy with the timing of the balls in the obstacle course, and the ball walk needs some more work. But I'm fairly happy with the blended clips in MotionBuilder, though I think I should have spent a bit more time on animating in the program as well.

Below is a screenshot of the ball rig I made in Maya. We were instructed on the exact setup of the rig and it was fairly straightforward as it was the first time most of us had rigged in Maya. But I now have an understanding of the basic principles in both Max and Maya, so I shouldn't have too much difficulty if I need to create my own rig again.

New year, new (belated) blog

My intention was to get this blog off the ground well before Christmas, so I think a post is long overdue. I hate having an online footprint of any kind, so I guess that's the reason I've been putting it off for so long. But, I won't get very far if I don't push myself out of my comfort zone and having a catalogue of my work and progress is going to help me see the weaknesses in my work and workflow techniques.

I'll start off by uploading the work I did earlier in the year and upload regular updates from this point on. So here it is, Blog 2.0, now with content!