mandaloregaming

Update #32 - On To Sci-Fi (Patreon)

Published:

2019-05-06 23:37:59

Edited:

2019-05-07 08:37:02

Imported:

2021-03

Content

Evening everybody.

The Return of the King video finally got out last week. When people asked me what the hardest video to work on was, the answer used to be Aurora 4x, now it's going to be the Lord of the Rings The Return of the King. I went through several versions trying to get just one to go through, and when it finally did YouTube added some slight distortion to the first few minutes of audio for reasons I don't understand. From what I've learned the new algorithm updates will only hit things for copyright and other scans at random so that people can't reliably "game the system".

So that explains why testing footage out failed completely. It's now not only a matter of seeing what's claimed by somebody, but also a matter of guessing if it's actually unclaimed or if something could sneak up later or on a completely different upload.

So there won't be anymore movie licensed games like that in the foreseeable future with the exception of Riddick, and two other Lord of the Rings games that aren't direct movie-tie ins like this one was.

Out of all the test renders to share here, I figured the best would be the original version I wanted for the Sean Astin segment. It basically just used a track from the movie that lined up nicely, and a few additional movie clips. It's not too different from the live video being a minor edit from the major stuff I had to do, but I still wish I could've gone with this part above all else. I guess I was lucky that Stronghold's Castle Jam worked out so well timing wise.

Also, one of the animators for the game reached out to me and uploaded a reel of his work he did on the game. You can see that attached to the top of the post above, and I got to learn a bit more behind the scenes stuff. Namely that not only were they using the same stunt doubles for some motion work, but they actually had access to a lot of the captures that were being used in the film so they were able to just implement them in directly. He did work on the NPC enemies, and a lot of those had to be keyframed by hand and didn't use any capture which is pretty incredible with how well they blend in to the mocap work. So that's a nice extra!

I've currently been recording for Alpha Centauri, and Elite Dangerous is continuing in the background as always. When Alpha Centauri is done with, I'm going to be shifting to primarily focusing on Elite Dangerous, with maybe something shorter I can do in the meanwhile since there's still a lot to do there. More to come on that soon.

Thanks as always for all your support!

Files

NPC animation for EA's "Return of the King" game

A reel of a few of the moves that I animated for EA's "Return of the King" game way back in 2002-ish. There were about 10 animators who worked on the project, and I only worked on the non-playable characters. We had access to all of the mocap that was recorded for the movies and a lot of these moves were based on that data. Some of the moves were entirely keyframe (like the Paths of the Dead zombies). For some characters, where one generic motion tree was used across several different body types, you had to account for all of the possible weapons combos. That's why, in the case of the Paths of the Dead zombies, you see them carrying a whole bunch of different gear - all of which had to be animated to make sense and avoid collisions.