Saturday, July 17, 2010

Inferno Animation

It's been too long...
Here's a few quick-n-dirty video captures of some of my contribution to Dante's Inferno.
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For the Death boss fight, I was responsible for all of Death's game-play animation (download the demo to see more). In this clip, I didn't animate Dante, except for the Death grab mini-game where Death holds him up by the neck. In that specific sequence (which includes the kick-off), I was responsible for animating both Death and Dante, as well as the camera.

Dante's Inferno Animation: Death from TJ Phan on Vimeo.

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In this next clip I animated both characters, as well as the camera. For the record though, there's extra in-game procedural camera movement on-top of my hand-keyed camera which, imo, might be giving it a little too much wobble during certain segments.

Dante's Inferno Animation: Death Finishers from TJ Phan on Vimeo.

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Moving on to these enemy finishers, I animated both characters and the camera. The camera anims didn't come out exactly how I wanted since it was somewhat of a difficult process to get Maya cameras to transfer over to in-game cameras. We eventually got a TD to write a melscript, but this was before that. Basically I had to set some keys, move the camera blindly in Maya, export it into the game, go back into Maya to adjust, repeat...kinda wish I could redo them a bit. Due to technical constraints, we also couldn't move the camera during the "cross-to-the-face" button mash segment. That's why it feels a bit static during that moment. Also, the original intent of the first cross-absolve move was to blast off the head only, but we were told that wasn't going to pass certification in certain regions.

Dante's Inferno Animation: Guard Finishers from TJ Phan on Vimeo.

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Next up is the Trails of St. Lucia. This was a DLC for the main game where you could create your own trials and upload for others to play. St. Lucia was the new playable character that came with the DLC. I got to animate roughly 80% of her move-set. As for the anims shown in this video, I animated all of them, except for when she gets knocked back by the horned enemy (around 00:32). I did not animate any of the enemies shown in the video.

Btw, I participated in a little Q and A session about St. Lucia a while back. Click here to read.

Dante's Inferno Animation: St. Lucia from TJ Phan on Vimeo.

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For this next eye-stab sequence, I animated both characters and the camera.

Dante's Inferno Animation: King Minos from TJ Phan on Vimeo.

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And again in this last sequence, I animated both characters and the camera. I didn't animate the little flying enemies in the beginning.

Dante's Inferno Animation: Phlegyas from TJ Phan on Vimeo.


There you have it...for better or worse, those were some of my work from the last game. Sorry for the low capture quality (just trying to hide my anim mistakes).

Also, I was thinking about maybe following up later with a little post-mortem for each clip--maybe talk about some of the challenges that came up for each or some of the tricks used to meet those challenges...I don't know...maybe...
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Lastly, I figured the timing was right to post since earlier this week, we all bid fair well to Vince Napoli as he moves down to SoCal to start new adventures.

"A good friend and an even better captain..." he was our lead combat designer on Inferno, the guy who was responsible for a huge portion of the fun stuff that made it into the game. He's also the designer that managed to finally convince me that I could have more anticipation in my attack anims and still have it feel responsive. Hopefully I was able to convince him in the end that ninja's are cool!