This is just too cool to be left out. Next month, Rockstar Games [the makers of the controversial yet ridiculously fun Grand Theft Auto series] are releasing their newest game : L.A. Noire. The facial animation of the characters in this game has to be seen to be believed.
First official trailer :
A few videos explaining the gameplay a bit more :
..and a look behind the scenes on how the facial animations were created :
This is definitely a big step forward for actor/story-driven games. For more info on the game, here's the link.
Last month, we organized the 3rd Adobe User Group Meeting right here in FCM. Pretty interesting stuff, with discussions about Maya/AE integration, using Blender as an open source alternative, and camera tracking in AE among other things [Nicky, maybe you can post a few pics/do a short review on the session?]
We're in the middle of organizing the annual Animation Career Week [which should be held early next month]. It's open to everybody, completely free, and will take place over the course of 3 full days. There will be speakers from animation/FX houses, post-production companies, game studios, and probably some talks from government & financial representatives to give advice on career opportunities and management. Stay tuned.
Aside from that, Research Creation Exhibition #3 2011 has been announced! It's taking place late this year, and most of us are already scrambling to get our projects together. More updates on that will come, as the projects get more fleshed out.
This year's annual GDC just wrapped up last month, and as expected, all the big guns brought out their... well, their big guns to the show. New games were announced, new trends and techniques were discussed and, as they do every year, new tech was showcased.
There's a ton of videos out there for you to find on what went on at GDC, but here are a few of my personal favourites, involving new technology/software :
Autodesk! Showing off their 2012 lineup.
Nvidia's APEX integrated into the 2012 versions of Max & Maya [PhysX/hardware accelerated solvers for dynamic simulations such as cloth, rigid body collisions, particles, destruction effects and even foliage]. There's a lot more videos of these on youtube. About time this showed up, it's been in development for years.
Maya 2012 has a whole bunch of new features [editable motion trails, enhancements to the viewport, new render pass management and the list goes on and on] but here are a few features which really stood out for me.
Digital Molecular Matter [DMM] for realistic shattering finally comes to Maya -
More variety and new applications for procedurally generated textures -
Editable motion trails in the viewport [byebye graph editor?] -
Max 2012 also comes with a lot of enhancements - here's an interesting video from Grant Warwick comparing its performance with previous versions [he also has a full review video of Max 2012 if you want to look it up].
Mudbox 2012 also has significant upgrades, with improved performance, transparency support, new blending layers, new painting options, support for texels and so much more.
As for realtime rendering, Epic also released demo vids for the latest iteration of their mind-blowing Unreal 3 Engine, sporting a whole bunch of DX11 features -
...and Crytek refused to be outdone, showcasing the features available in their new CryEngine 3 techdemo -
There are so many more videos out there on what went down at GDC 2011, so if you're interested, hunt them down. One thing's for sure, there's a lot of exciting stuff coming our way very, very soon.
