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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
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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
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