Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/119349
n n n n Animation•Career movies using high-end renderers like Pixar's RenderMan, which generally take much longer but result in much higher quality. The boundaries that define this difference are even starting to blur, with many games also incorporating non-real-time rendered cinematic sequences into their products for story exposition, and technological advances dramatically increasing the quality of real-time rendered visuals. I am an animator who has been fortunate enough to work in both these exciting industries since 2001. Originally from the UK, I have worked at some of the most respected film and game development studios in the world, including Ubisoft Montreal, Industrial Light & Magic, DreamWorks Animation, and currently Valve Corporation in Bellevue, Washington. As such, I can offer insight into the similarities animators can expect in their day-to-day experiences in either of these mediums. Animation Knowledge Despite the visual difference between the appearance of Valve's DOTA 2 and an animated feature film, many of the technical processes used to create the animation content are very similar, or created by artists who utilize a common knowledge across both media. Converging Course Despite the fact that movie production had an almost 100-year head start over video games, the two have finally started to dramatically converge when we speak specifically about animation and the methods used to create it. With the development of new types of 3D games – notably starting with Doom in 1993, and then soon after with polygonalbased true 3D games such as Quake in 1996 – mainstream video game development quickly migrated from using 2D paint packages and sprite strips to 3D content creation packages, such as 3D Studio Max (the Discreet predecessor of Autodesk's 3ds Max). Strangely enough, despite advances as early as the late-'70s, it took until 1993, with the incredibly successful Jurassic Park, to convert the movie business to using 3D computer graphics for authoring the majority of character and VFX-based animation. Largely attributed to this advancement was the availability of relatively cheap computer systems that afforded 38 game developers and hobbyist animators the ability to use software that had, until that point, only really been accessible by the movie special effects industry. Today, the process of creating a character animation for a mainstream 3D game is almost identical to that of a 3D character for a multimillion-dollar movie production – the only difference being the visual fidelity. The articulation of a character via the rigging process is often done using identical software – this holds true for the animation itself, as well. In fact, the advancements in 3D computer graphics software, such as Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, has allowed authoring of almost every visual element in both film and game content; modeling, shading, lighting, and procedural effects can all be generated on these platforms. One of the key differences at this time is the method used to render images to the screen, with games generally using real-time technology and generating visuals on the fly, and Animation is driven by the same set of core guidelines regardless of what the animation is being created for, so the skill set required when you look at animation purely as an art form is the same across both games and movies. Understanding what specialized animation knowledge to apply to a situation and how to best execute that for the product comes with experience. It's important to not get too swept up in technology and remember that a group of men figured this stuff out in the early 1930s, and their discoveries have laid the foundation for hours upon hours of successful storytelling. It is true that video games, in particular, expose and often exploit these apparent advances in technology, but the role an animator plays on a production is the same across these two fields: to compel the audience to want to see more. In a movie, that is done by selecting acting choices which make the characters believable, allowing the audience to trust what they are watching and to empathize with those characters. In a video game, the animation needs to be unobtrusive and reactive to the player's input, allowing the person to become immersed in the experience, yet at the same time, it must perform the same storytelling function that would be expected from a movie. Many games now are trying to create more opportunity for animators to create these compelling experiences by entering the player into scenarios wherein they can see characters act and behave in a similar fidelity as they would in an animated movie, bridging the kind of animation created by artists even closer together. The release of DreamWorks Animation's Madagascar 3 this past summer included a March/April 2013 CGW0313-GameVfilmpfin.indd 38 3/14/13 12:51 PM