For those of you who find yourselves in the lucky position of being game artists, one of the greatest ongoing challenges is to find ways to leverage an enormous cache of materials and palettes to create powerful, realistic worlds that draw in players. John Gardner began his career working at a TV station in Tennesse, and now, thirteen years later, he's a Graphic Artist with SouthPeak interactive. The Steel Assassin . Sergei Boginski is the lead animator at Creat Studio in St. Petersburg, Russia. Inc. He was the second artist hired on for Riven and spent a good two years in overtime making textured objects, creating lit environments, and dabbling a little with designs.
Motion capture is a great tool for creating animation for certain types of games.
Like any tool or piece of software, if you learn how to use it properly, it can make your life easier and produce great results, but if you try to wing it, chances are you'll end up wasting time and money and may come away with nothing useful. Melianthe Kines discusses motion capture in depth. Jeff Hayes focuses on some of the techniques he has used over the last ten years for creating motion assets efficiently. Crowd scenes, schooling fish, and other forms of flocking behavior once required postprocessing techniques. However, using Maya Embedded Language, you can script these behaviors within the animation environment.