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rpanimator33 karma

Well it’s hard to say which pirate was the coolest but I found a lot of inspiration in Steven silvers shape language and costuming ideas. Check out his work sometime he does a lot of really great pirate character designs!!

Yeah when we worked on projects (@sony sandiego) we worked with naughty dog and their hours are pretty tough. The work we all did on uncharted 4 was some of the best animation I’ve had the pleasure of being commissioned to produce. And even though the schedules are rough the product is of the highest caliber and something to be proud of. When you’re trying to make a game with hundreds of people and shooting for blockbuster movie quality the hours just sadly have to be put in to achieve that level of polish.

rpanimator33 karma

Well there are many facets of game development. I would say most fields in the game industry pay well enough to support a family. I would focus on doing the type of work you enjoy and cater it to the studios you would like to work for.

Here are some careers that loosely match different personality types

Producer - organized, go getter Artist - creative, productive Hr - caring, nuturing Animator - class clown , loves to work Programmer - number and logic oriented

Ect.

A good place to start would be a great school that teaches the fundamentals of game art/design or a business school that is familiar with the gaming industry. If you can’t affairs to go to school just start googling the topics your interested in. There’s a ton of free knowledge out there!!

Hope you find the perfect job!

rpanimator25 karma

Unity, the programmers that I work with felt more comfortable with C# and their ability to use Unity as a framework to extend the custom parts we needed.

rpanimator23 karma

Wow that’s a tough question and I think the situation varies from studio to studio. I have worked for servers studios that were great in terms of hours and really valued their teams work life balance, and I have worked for others that were not afraid to crunch for years on end and burn people out. I do think that AAA game development has a future and can be a great experience for all involved. In my opinion the solution lies in scheduling and pre planning. Games love to have the freedom to change design, scope and content on the fly but that is a slippery slope to long hours and burnout. I would say a studios strongest defense against burnout is a sold game plan where all content story and gameplay is decided upon before the production begins of course this is a best case scenario but I have seen company’s that work this way and they are very successful!

rpanimator22 karma

I was specifically involved with the cinematic department. Being that cinematic are mainly movies that run in the game engine we don’t have too much collaboration with coders in our day to day work. However the game play animation team works heavily with designers , coders and the engine on the day to day.

In most games that naughty dog creates all of the motions start with a motion capture shoot. Then the animator adds all of the things that don’t get motion captured such as fingers and Tongue. Then the animator will do a whole round of cleanup on the Mocap. Many things don’t translate cleanly from the mocap shoot to the game character and they need to be adjusted to look correct. Usually the shoulders end up looking shrugged and legs won’t fully extend looking squatty and bowed.

Also there are many situations where the director will request a performance change in the fly that wasn’t shot in the motion capture. A lot of time this will need to be created entirely from scratch and this is a tough challenge because the level of realism the animator has to achieve is very high so the new performance will fit in with the realistic mocap surrounding it.

As far as game traversal goes I would say most animations are created in place and then the code drives those animated moves through the game.