Just Put One Foot In Front of the Other

We've been look a lot at movement animations at work, which reminded me of this old Game Developer article from 2007. It's got some handy reference for animators and tech animators, and it pushes one of my favorite ideas - a four way blend between  fast and slow, short and long versions of the same walk cycle as a way to get lots of variety and nicely tweakable ground speed for characters.

The Conquest of Space

One of the hardest thing about working in our business is that the technology evolves faster than our means of talking about it. There are a lot of things which we learn in the course of our work that we have a hard time passing on, because the field is so small and so few of us have leisure to try to find ways to sum up all of the practical knowledge we pick up along the way.
I originally wrote this for Game Developer in 2006, and it was always one of my favorite columns.

Sweet Sumotori Dreams

I had no idea that the genius behind Sumotori Dreams is still making awesome procedural animation toys.

If you're not familiar with Sumotori Dreams, it's the funniest thing that ever happened to procedual animation.  Proof here (loud cackling and some profanity in the audio track, could not find any that did not have lots of hilarity and shouting):

If you're at all interested in procedural animation - or have even a tiny sliver of a sense of humor - you should buy the iPhone app the android app, or the PC version.  This guys deserves our support!

On a related note, if you like this you may find this talk from the developer of Overgrowth interesting as well.

No Humans Involved (Classic CG)

Saw a great paper in +Robert Butterworth 's feed which reminded me of this classic SIGGRAPH presentation from 1994 - one of the all time greats in procedural animation.  None of the motion in this was animated by hand :)

Future Watch: Graphics & Animation Research

I've added a permanent page to keep track of interesting academic research. It's over in the sidebar.  If you're at all into animation, download the videos or the ppt of the paper on gait optimization. It's fun -- unless you're an animator, in which case it's a bit scary.



The list is a bit skimpy atm, I'll post updates as it expands.