What is up guys! Since our last general development update we’ve had our heads down working on a lot of streams of development simultaneously. We’re at a stage in the project where a lot of things are happening, but visible results won’t be forthcoming until several of these things start to reach completion and come together.
We wanted to keep the community up to date, and let you in on a behind the scenes look at our motion capture session with our friend and pro skater, Walker Ryan.
We traveled to Vancouver to Sawmill Studios, where Walker was strapped into the famous ‘golf ball suit’ and rifled off tricks with an ease that was impressive, especially when considering that there were motion sensors taped to his shoes and board. The sensors on the suit, when paired with motion sensing cameras, capture the animated motions that will give the tricks in the game a lifelike fluidity and smoothness.
There are a lot of steps to the process after the shoot, first the data is ‘cleaned’ by both computer algorithms and then by hand by a mocap artist to remove any jitters or errors. The animations are then mapped to our new character model’s “skeleton” so they can be applied to the character and make him move in-game.
Our animators then go through a detailed process of editing and altering the animations for the specific needs of the animation system we created for Skater XL.
As mentioned in the last update, this is the first skating game to ever have complete, fluid control of your board and feet that is driven by natural physics movement rather than canned animations, so we have to slice up and tweak hundreds of animations into precise bits and pieces that can be mixed, matched and adapted on the fly to follow what the player is doing in the moment. This creates the completed movements of flips, grinds, manuals, etc.
It’s fiddly work and there are months of editing for our two animators yet to complete and polish, but we’re confident will result in gameplay with unmatched realism once all the details are in place.
The results of the animation implementation will be covered in a future update, but for now check out these images and video from the shoot.
Thanks for all your support and we’ll see you on the next update!
https://youtu.be/KekZQfVyCd4
https://youtu.be/VJvEHjvLyBM
https://youtu.be/bDcua2HMKWA
