CGF - What is an average day like at Monolith?
Normally, I can arrive at work as late as 11am, although I tend to arrive around 7:30am so I can get home in time to spend the afternoon with my wife and son. I have my cup of coffee and a stale pop-tart, respond to any email from people that will get angry if I don't, then begin animating or managing. We're expected and trusted to put in a solid eight hour work day, five days a week. This isn't always the case though. Each game has numerous milestones. These are points in development where we step back and take a survey of where we stand in the creation process. Some milestones require us to submit a build of the game to the publisher so they have a clear understanding of how the game is shaping up. Usually, right before a major milestone, there will be some overtime expected. This means we go from about a 40 hour work week, to about a 50 hour or so week. This never lasts long though, and early on in the project it isn't even needed. The final month or so of development is usually pretty hectic, where overtime is once again expected.
CGF - What has changed over the years for a game developer?
I used to say the gaming industry in general reminded me of a toddler. One who was new to the world, and tended to run itself into walls on occasion. But it was never really phased by those collisions, and continued to try and learn what big brother, in this case the movie industry, was doing. But I can't really say that any longer. The gaming industry has discovered it's own identity, and is driving a new form of entertainment to the masses. It has really come a long way in the 7 years I've been on the inside. It's gone from being targeted to a niche group of consumers, to rivaling the film industry on a consumer base level. And as the people who grew up playing games get older, they become more rooted into society's roles, making the act of gaming more socially acceptable.
From an animation perspective, not only has it grown as an art form, but technologically speaking, it's made some NBA sized leaps. For my first few games, 3d was new technology, and memory for running real-time 3d characters was very limiting. I was forced to keep my frame rate down to 10 frames per second, and keep my cycles down to 1 loop. The animations were being applied per verticy on the model, which meant that the positional data of each vert, on each character, for each animation, on each frame had to be stored on the players RAM. I had to make the most of each pose, because I really didn't get many. I had to always remain conscious of where I could reuse animations in an effort to save more memory, possibly freeing myself up for an extra animation later. At that time, a select few game engines had come up with a method to export bones into the game engine, to dramatically save on memory constraints. As animation technology advanced, the memory cost dropped dramatically, and the PC or console became more powerful. With this new console generation, we're nearly at the point where memory is no longer a concern for animation, and the look and use of the animations are what matters. Now, the extra processing power is being applied to in-game IK solutions, animation blending, ragdoll physics, and even some dynamic simulation, which is the technology Lucas Arts is using for its next generation of games.
CGF - What is your favorite type of project to work on?
The American market is highly focused on serious first person games, and role playing games right now. Development costs and marketing budgets are at an all time high, so publishers are less risky with their decisions. This has a limiting factor on the different kinds of games I safely have an opportunity to work on. The reason I chose to work on Condemned was because I really enjoy animating melee combat. This goes back to my interest in the martial arts. The complexity of melee combat is a passion, and having an opportunity to tackle it from a first person perspective was, and still is irresistible. This is also why I chose to work on Jedi Academy and Xmen: Legends as well, both heavy in the physical animation department. I do hope to one day before my career ends, have the opportunity to work on a 3rd person one-on-one fighting game.
CGF - What tools do you use to generate your work?
At home, I like to use 3DS Max with Character Studio. When I do my personal work, I tend to shy away from the technical aspects, and like to simply focus on the art. Max was the first package I learned how to animate with, so I know it very well, which eliminates the need to deal with technical snags.
At work, we use Maya to do all of our keyframe animation, and most of our motion capture animation work. The sheer flexibility of maya, and its tools such as the trax editor and Mel scripting, are essential to our workflow. Our motion capture equipment is from a company called Motion Analysis. We process our data in a package called Eva Realtime. We recently started incorporating Motion Builder into our pipeline as well. There are a few of us at work, including me, who have really fallen for some of its ease of use features.
Outside of the purchased tools, there are a handful of internally created tools we also use. We have separate tools for most tasks, such as setting up our characters to work properly in game, placing them into levels with instructions on what AI routines or weapons to use, and storing the animation names and traits into a game database.
