Hello and welcome to my showreel of animations with motion capture technology.
Most of the site is still under construction but more media will be added!
This will my proper first blog post on wordpress:
Introduction
This will brief explain who am I as a student from Gotland University with major in game design, but want to focus on the animations for games. What attribute do I posses, both strength and weakness, how I work and lastly, my future plan.
How I work
As a person, I will always strive to work well with my fellow worker with different skills sets. I always make sure the things I am responsible for is correct before I hand it over too the next person. I will always take advice and consideration from co-workers when working.
But since I am much a dedicated as an artist, I have absolutely no knowledge in the programming field, or terms I am not familiar with. That can cause some confusion and misunderstanding. The work process can take longer time than expected when I need to work with someone that doesn’t have the same skill set.
When encountering a problem that I have no idea of solution, I always use the internet as help. I search on specific forums that might solve my problem. If the internet search doesn’t give any answer, or just to unique as a problem, I try to solve it by testing different methods. I think of a theory, try that as a solution and see if it solve the problem. If not, I try again with another method/theory. But sometimes I can give up to quickly, so fast that I don’t even check carefully on the internet. It’s most likely when I have many things too do, and don’t want to be slow downed by a problem. During these situation, I hand the problem to someone else.
What inspire me
I have been working with animations for short amount of time, but the joy of bringing 3D-models to life thru mo-cap is indescribable. On most recent AA/AAA games, the animations on those is almost jaw dropping. Max Payne 3 smooth transitions between each moves while lying on the floors, Battlefield 3 ANT animations system that blends different stance (stand, crouch and prone) and so forth. These kind of games inspire me to do similar work.
Experience
I have animated ever since I began my first group game project. At first it was hand animations, keyframes, and used regular bones in 3ds max. In the second year project, I used CAT bones for keyframes animations. But at the end of third year, I began working with motion capture and used it for our game in development. I even based my third year thesis using the motion capture for creating ingame animations. I created an pipeline, there I explain how from pre-productions to shooting the animations, clean, editing on Motionbuilder, then to the game engine UDK.
Challenges
I like the challenge when I need to work with the actors during the shoot, make sure every moves they make is perfect as much as possible. Solving special kinds of moves that might need special artifact or body harness to achieve it, even a simple tap on the gun muzzle to simulate recoil was something I enjoyed. When working with Motionbuilder for editing the animations, most of them won’t look good on the 3D-modell character. As an animator I must fix those before I can send it to the game engine. Some animations is harder than others, and those are quite challenging to fix. They can give the greatest grief, but once they are solved, I feel quite proud of it.
Me with the actor in motion capture studio
Character
As a person, I don’t have a lot of way to express emotionally or artistically. The only time I can express myself is during the mo-cap shoot. There I can express each moves accordingly to the set mood. Will always get the work done to the end. Whenever I get problems, I always find ways to solve it, so I would say I got an certain self-discipline. In my field of work that I am pursing, you need to socialize with a lot of people. Since I interact with both actor and stage people during the shoot. I am somebody whom can be unkind to someone when things aren’t done properly, which leads me more job to do.
Aspire
I aspire to work on the gaming industry. Either at DICE, Starbreeze studio, Avalance or any other industry that share a common genre. Which are in need of animator that specialize in motion capture and motionbuilder. But I do want to avoid unpaid jobs, since it’s have been reported that 44% of the workforce on the creative media have work unpaid jobs to get into the industry. I want to get into the industry right away when I am done with the studies.
Expectation
I need to put a lot of muscle and time to gain any position that I am striving towards too. Since I started with mo-cap animations at almost towards the end of my third year. I need to prove that I am skilled with the motionbuilder program and actually can edit in-game animations. What I need to do is keep editing animations in the program, learn every tricks and getting into a comfort zone where I can work with it as a second nature.
//Kakee
