Old Cairo. Project Caspian Character Concepts

F.E.A.R. 2 Outtakes

In early versions of the last mission in F.E.A.R 2, Griffin was the final boss that you fought. Story changes dictated that Keeton would become the boss and his attacks would changed accordingly.

When Griffin was the planned boss, he was considered a "Super Remnant" (apologies... these terms only mean something if you have played the game) with a powerful scream attack that would cone out from his lips to seek and destroy the player. Below is the animation I did for his attack. I added a lot of speed and pause to give an eerie feel to his movment.

I performed the original motion capture on this, and if you want to see how much key-framed alteration I did on the final animation take a look at the render of the raw mo-cap data below.

F.E.A.R. 2 Abomination Posing Sheet

Posing sheet for F.E.A.R. 2's Abomination by yours truly. I was pushing for long bat-like arms and short stubby under developed legs for easy contortion. The final model wasn't quite this extreme.

Fast and loose thumbnails to try to nail down the attitude of the Abomination. I was inspired the bat movement research I did.

F.E.A.R. 2 Abomination Proof of Concept

During the preproduction of F.E.A.R. 2 I was assigned the task of developing a proof of concept for the mutant creature Abomination. We wanted to prototype a playable scene the lead designer, John Mulkey, had conceptualized. The purpose was to see if we could create an unease in the player with the creepy ambiance and movement showcased by this creature.

Below is a capture of the actual playthrough. All conceptualizing and animation was done by me (except for the final pounce on the player at the end of the video which was done by my good friend Ron Harvey). The environments and scripting were done by level designers Ka'ai Cluney and Jared Gerritzen.

Mulkey and our producer loved it, and the Abomination now had a grounded reference for future production considerations.

F.E.A.R. 2 Abomination Movement Prototype

During the pre-production of the video game F.E.A.R. 2, the lead game designer John Mulkey had a specific idea of how he wanted to present the Abomination (the enemy mutant in the game). He needed to hide in the shadows, with movement that would bring the darkness alive. He would need to dart in a creepy fashion to unnerve the player and keep his form a mystery. He should be able to fold his body up into contortions humans could not endeavor.

This was an early maya test that I did using an untextured soldier model to try and achieve the feel John was looking for.

Latest Piece

Here is an animation sequence I just finished recently. The theme was "action".

Interview with Sergio Pablos

Love this guy.

"I enjoy slightly caricatured characters. I don´t have anything against realism, but I figure it´s a lot more fun when you can take someone´s character traits, and interpret them with exageration. Nothing wild, but just enough to call attention towards the important stuff."

http://sergio-pablos-interview.blogspot.com/

Dialogue Animation

This is a dialogue sequence I did for my latest game F.E.A.R. 2. All of the staging, mocap performance, and augmentation to the data along with the facial animation was done by me. The face and hands were all hand keyed.

Feral Antagonist

Feral Antagonist

I am starting this blog as a motivation to make time to draw more and show my train of thought in terms of design.

This was a concept proposed to my good friend, and art director Cory Allemeier at Monolith. The considerations were for a feral child character that snorted a drug called muscle to accelerate its actions.

The consistant use of muscle at such a young age would cause the following physical abnormalities:

• Child-like under developed skull.
• Visible separations in the cranium like a baby
• Sunken, hollow eyes
• Under developed nose from snorting Muscle
• Under developed baby teeth because Muscle stunts growth in calcium-permanent teeth. This makes the baby teeth stay in the mouth too long and rot, causing under developed jaw line
• Baby hair grows in patches, just like newborn hair. Follicle growth has been stunted too.
• Protruding spinal column

Motion Capture Augmentation -vs- Key Framing

I am an animator in the interactive entertainment industry. My forte' is AI design and character development and how it relates to game design and engineering. I started off as a traditional animator in the film industry years ago... but am now fully entrenched in the world of CG and motion capture manipulation.

Some animators are uncomfortable with the idea of animating to motion capture, as opposed to traditional keyframed animation. In highend video game production, however, when working with realism... your characters movements need to feel authentic and have the subtle nuances that occur in real life. In order for hand keyframers to achieve this we resort to video taping ourselves or others going through the intended actions after figuring out the staging. Every serious animator does this. Then we study our movements and project them onto our character, with added penache.

It is the same procedure with motion capture, except you eliminate the projection on to your character. The data does this for you. I stage the action, don the mo-cap suit, perform the intended scene or movement, and magically (almost) it gets applied to your character. From there I manipulate the timing and the posing to push the performance the way I envisioned and I end up with a stylistic, realistic, nuanced performance that is unique to my vision in much less time.

Anyone who is videotaping themselves as reference to animate to is already doing what is sought after by motion capturing. The authenticity of the movement. But they are missing the time critical middle step of applying the physical data to the model afterwards by arduously hand keying it.

Obviously this technique is not recommended for creatures or more cartoony approaches to animation.