Widunder

I got a strange mail today, from a recruiter who got me the chance of doing an animation test for Ninja Theory Ltd this summer. He had forwarded a mail he got from Ninja Theory themselves. Containing a link:

http://www.split-screen.com/2009/10/23/first-animation-reel-of-ninja-theorys-enslaved/

Animator Markus Hammarstedt, whose previous experience includes GRIN’s Terminator Salvation and Massive Entertainment’s World in Conflict has worked on a special melee sequence animation for Ninja Theory, copyrighted in 2009. The animation only shows the basic punches and kicks – hopefully Ninja Theory will reveal the game soon enough and we can take a closer look at the weapon combat.

In other words, it implies that the animation is intended for Ninja Theory’s new game. And that I work for Ninja Theory. Wrong and wrong!
In the mail from Ninja Theory, they said they understands if this is not my fault. But they kindly ask me to mail this split-screen dudes and ask them to correct the information.
I of course did, and I also deleted the animation test from my Vimeo-page. Wouldn’t be good if this misunderstanding happens again.

Pretty weird thing though, do game journalists just make assumptions  on what they find on google? My video on vimeo did not say anything about this being a part of a game. And also, if they had found my portfolio site or my linkedin profile (which is easy to find if they had just googled my name) they would have found that I haven’t ever worked for Ninja Theory.
Strange indeed…

Developer Diaries is a really good idea, in my opinion. I really enjoy watching interviews and videos about developers. The sad thing is that most of the time developers seem to talk only about things that puts the game on a pedestal. I don’t blame them (or the publishers, who’s probably resonsible for most of the content in these videos) though, as the purpose of developer diaries is to promote the game at hand. Why else do the diaries?

BUT, I think that you can still promote a game by talking honestly about the developing process. For me personally I enjoy this more than just pure promotion talk. I would rather hear about the hardships of the development process and what problems they had to overcome. And how they solved their greatest obstacles.

Good example:

He’s talking about how they came up with the idea, what tricks they used and how they came up with the name. He talks about the earlier stages of the development process. This gets me more interested in the game, and in the developer as well. Because they share more information than they need to and for me the prooves that they really wants people to develop games and that they want people to play their game, not just spend money on it. Of course, they want people to spend money on it, but it’s not that very obvious.

Bad example:

In this one they say things like “It’s not a game, it’s not a movie, it’s an experience…” and “We decided to push the limits” as well as “We don’t see it as they are making a movie and we’re making a game. We see it as we’re building a world together”

This is the kind of quotes which makes it really obvious that they are only interested in selling the game and to hype it as much as they can. Again, it’s probably because of a push from the publisher. Of course, it’s always about the money. A developer and a publisher is always mainly interested in the money. But, as I mentioned before, you can make it less obvious to the audience.
“We decided to push the limits” for example. Well of course you did! What else would you be doing? Making something really basic and bland with intent? Of course you push technology and ideas in order to make something new and really awesome that will sell. They also talk about that they are sharing assets in the production, between the movie and the game, as if that would be something new and unique that they figured out. Which it really isn’t. This is the most common way if producing a game based on a movie.

I don’t know if it’s just because I’m not the target audience for these movies (since I think most developers are really critical about these things) that they just don’t do it for me. I only get more and more skeptical about a game when I see this. I have no idea how big of an impact a developer diary has on sales for a game or if the majority of gamers likes diaries, but I guess it’s not a big difference from a regular trailer.

As I said before, I don’t blame the developers for doing this as I understand the purpose. And I don’t despite the Avatar devs for their video, and I hope that they don’t take offence if they read this. I just don’t agree with the way their doing this.

I’ve seen a lot of portfolio pages. I always thinks it’s fun to find new artists, animator, you name it and I always look at what they have to offer. The problem is that I often see portfolio pages with issues. Mostly it is because of the content, but some times the general layout which makes it very annoying and difficult to find stuff that should be very clear and easy to find.

For instance, if you’re an animator and you are applying for a job at Studio X. A producer or human resources person recieves your application, looks at it and hopefully forwards it to a lead animator. The lead animator will then look at your CV roughly before opening your portfolio page. The very first thing he is looking for is animations that can show off your abilities, to see if you’re any good for the job. Hopefully an animation reel.

A lot of pages fails here, making a guest at his/her webpage look for the content instead of serving the guest the content. Mind that this lead animator probably gets a lot of mails every day about a new animator looking for a job, so he has looked at LOTS of animation portfolios. His patience is probably pretty short by now. So, if he can’t find what he’s looking for he will just close it down and ignore you.

Another thing is, never ever include irrelevant work that doesn’t have anything to do with the role you’re applying for. No lead animator cares about how well you can draw different stuff. He’s looking for animations, NOTHING else. Sure, some studios are saying on their job page that it’s a plus if you’re skilled at photoshop for example, or if you’re good at drawing human figures. But if you’re work isn’t world class then it’s probably not worth showing up. Less is more, just keep the amazing animations instead of lots of other stuff that has nothing to do with your wished position.

Regarding showing up only animations, only keep the GREAT animations. Quality over quantity. If you have 5 animations, and 3 of them suck, then it’s way better just showing up the 2 instead of all 5 of them. As any lack of detail or quality will pull down your overall score in the lead animator’s mind. The same thing with bad 2d art, or 3d art for that matter. If you’ve included stuff like this in your portfolio, it will unfortunately just make you look worse at what you do. The lead animator will assume you’re as bad at animation as you are at 2d or 3d. And even if your 2d and 3d work is amazing, then he will probably just think that you’re not serious about animation and won’t be interested. As he only wants to hire passionate animators. Not a animator/3d artist.

I just thought I would share some general tips for Motion Builder work flow. There isn’t a lot of documentation on Motion Builder out there, since the software is still fairly new within the game industry. And when I learned it I had to figure a lot of stuff out for myself. Things that would have saved me a lot of trouble of someone had been there and told me how to do certain things.

Anyways, so first up is just a small walk through on how to remove foot sliding or other weird movement that can occur in motion capture data.
Let’s say the original file looks like this (don’t mind the quality for the skinning or the rest of the animation, it has nothing to do with this little tutorial):

And a start is to make the left foot standing still, it shouldn’t move and rotate up and down like that at all.
The first time I tried to solve this problem I instantly tried to set a new key frame on the foot on a new layer. And the copy it to the end of the part where I wanted the foot to stand still. This doesn’t work at all since a keyframe without any new information doesn’t do anything at all, except maintaining the information from the Base Layer. This is kind of obvious if you know Motion Builder well, but I didn’t know this right away when I started out. Another way that I tried is to create a pose of the character on the first frame, and then applying the  pose again at the last frame and then only key the foot. This doesn’t work at all either since it still moves in between. It still gets the information from the base layer that it should move.
So just edit the base layer! It could sound scary if you want to keep your motion capture data in case anything goes wrong, but just save backups so you have everything unedited in case you need it later on.

If we take a look in the FCurves we can see that this part of the animation has curves like this:

Curves

The curves go all over place. So what we do is just delete the part of the animation where we want the foot to stay still. Except the first frame of that part of course. Now the curves should be flat, but the animation will probably look like this:

Which is not good at all obviously. The problem can be found in the curves:

Curves

There is only one frame between have a planted foot and having it lifted from the ground.
The solution is just to delete a couple of the key frames right after the last keyframe of the standing still-part. So there will be a bit of blend time in between the “standing still” and rest of the animation. The curves should now look like this:

Curves

And the result is that we have a foot that does not move weirdly while the character should have them standing still, and there is a nice blend to the rest of the animation for that foot.
Hope this was helpful. This stuff is very obvious way of solving this, but it could still take some trial and error before you figure it out for yourself if you’re new to this stuff. Like me, I was too focused with solving it with the layers and not touch the original motion capture data at all.

Internet at home finally! I moved into my apartment this weekend, and my furnitures arrived early saturday morning. And today (Tuesday) I got my internetz! Feels really good to be sitting at my old computer again at my own place.

Regarding moving into my apartment, I’ve done a lot of food shopping the last few days to stock up on stuff that I generally need in the kitchen. I never thought it would be so damn difficult to find the things I want. Of course I susptected it would be some what difficult to find some of the things that I needed. I’m used to buying some things that is very common in Sweden, and expected some of it to be available here as well. Like frozen salmon fillet or big bags of frozen chicken, but they had neither.

Frozen Salmon

And I was just out of breath while trying to look for certain standard spices. I managed to get salt and pepper at least. Also, they don’t have dishbrushes. Fortunately, I found that in IKEA, as well as a lot of swedish food. I guess I should’ve looked around more for different stuff in the food store, even when I was living in a hotel before I got my apartment. Lesson learned.

Dishbrush

In August 2009 it was decided. I was going to move to Poland and work for the Epic Games studio “People Can Fly” in Warsaw. Very exciting indeed.

The day when I was going to leave came insanely fast. I was excited as a little child going to the candy store on a Saturday. PCF (People Can Fly) had booked the flight for me and a hotel room that I would stay in during about 2 months while looking for a place of my own.

When I arrived in Poland I took a taxi to the hotel. The only thing I took with me was a huge bag of clothes and some other necessities. The room that I was given was like a small apartment, furnished. It had a kitchen and a washing machine in the bathroom. There was also a computer in the bedroom, which surprised me. Unfortunately it only had 256mb of RAM, which made it as slow as an old lady during a bad blizzard. I felt a bit of regret selling my laptop the week before at that time.

Warsaw Street

The day I arrived was a Saturday. But it was some kind of holiday, so most of the shops was closed. Despite this I thought it would be good to familiarize myself with the surroundings. So I went outside and took a stroll around the neighborhood. The place I stayed at was called “Babka Tower”. It was huge building with a lot of hotel rooms and also regular apartments. Higher up in the tower was also some offices and on the ground level there was several  shops as well.
On the other side of the street was the biggest shopping mall in Warsaw, called “Arkadia”. It was open even though all of the shops were closed. The only open ones were fast food restaurants and the Cinema. I tried KFC for the first time (since we don’t have this in Sweden) and failed to see what the fuzz was all about.
Later, I went to a nearby gas station in search for some breakfast materials. They had none of that, but they had a lot of alcohol. Important thing for by passing drivers. Overall the weekend passed by pretty quickly. I located the office about 5min walk away from my hotel so I would know where to go on Monday.

I had no idea what was going to happen on my first day. I had my expectations but I hadn’t gotten any real information except to show up at 11 in the morning.
I was greeted by one of the producers, that I had met before when I was there for the interview. He showed me around and then showed me to my desk, where he left me with my lead.
My lead introduced me to the other animators before I sat down at my desk. My Lead told me to set up my computer the way I wanted it, in terms of software, drivers, configure the 3d packages I was going to use, etc.
This basically took all of my first day.During the day a lot of people came at greeted me and welcomed me to the company, I felt very welcome. I was really fortunate to not feel very alone.
I was surprised that, quickly enough, I was working on animations for the game as fast as my second day at work. There was a small crunch going on as well because of a milestone so a lot of people was working over time in the office, which gave me the chance to learn a lot of new stuff quickly during my first week. I also managed to get a nice bunch of animations into the game for this milestone.

Now, as I’m writing, I’ve been here for almost 7 weeks and I can only say that it’s getting better and better the longer I’m here. Especially as I’m feeling more and more settled in here in this project and with my co-workers. The tasks I get is more and more exciting and I can’t wait for the game to be announced (whenever that will happen). Also I’ve found an apartment and I’m going to move in there in a couple of days. PCF hired a company that looked for apartments on my behalf, so I got to see a lot of nice apartments. At first I was worried how this would work out but in the end it was really easy to get a place to live, with that kind of help anyways.

END!
Next time I don’t know what I will talk about, we’ll see!

(Thanks to Slainchild for the pictures of Warsaw. http://www.slainchild.com/

Warsaw Old Town