Topic: Interesting interview with Waren Spector

[idolminds]

Read it here.

Some interesting topics like too much ultra-violence, Netflix, and other such fun things.

Q:In early animated features, somebody would just draw it and that was it. There was no story bible or drawing the skeletons... somebody would just do it.

Warren Spector: They do it differently from shot to shot. We figured that out on the first game. Traditional animators get to cheat all over the place. It's amazing, because they know where the camera is, and the camera's constantly moving, they can change the way they draw the character based on where the camera is, and we can't do that, darn it. We're an incredibly literal medium. I started thinking about that several years ago. We require precision, perfection, and consistency in a way that other media don't. It's one of the things that makes this so damn hard.

Q: You can still be creative, but you can't take shortcuts.

Warren Spector: The rig for our Mickey model on the first game, the first pass of that was done by a guy who had worked with Weta on the rig for Gollum. He said our rig was way more complicated than anything he's ever worked on in any film. In a film, you have a different rig based on the needs of an individual shot. We have to use one rig for the entire game to do everything that character is ever gonna do. That was a blowaway for me.

[Cobra951]

Interesting read.  Thanks.  I think he's spot on about E3.  But that's not the venue's fault.  It's the big players like MS putting their weight behind screwing up their platforms with non-gaming crap.  The comments about ultra-violence come across as somewhat self-serving, given what he's producing now.  Not that I think he's wrong.