Getting Ready for My first company tutorial

So the Art Director and Lead animator wants me to train some of the contractors to help out with some of the garments skinning. We have a variety of outfits and 8 body types to fit them on. With the help of Anim tools, we are able to speed up our skinning pipeline with simple steps and editing tools. Since I am more familiar with that work flow, leads feel I am the right person to instruct the contractors.

I spent sometime reviewing the work flow, because its been a while since I did any garment skinning. I also made a copy of some of the tools on paper, and wrote side comments on some of the often used buttons and hot keys, I think this will be a great way to visually show what these tools are all about. I also had a step by step process I made for myself in skinning garments. But I had to take some time to modify for easy reading and guideline work flow steps.

I roughed out my presentation and it goes something like this.

• Garment Skinning intro
• Getting Set up
• Skinning Methods
• Polish and Save
• Sum it up

Anyways I hope my training goes well, I am fully prepared. I have all the files set up and ready to go. Once the contractors know what to do, I will be tasking them with easy files for them to get their feet wet, and it will start to advance down the road. Their final tasks will be skinning up some of the heavy duty garments sets, that will take about a day and a half to do.

My 1st brief update to Art Team experiance.

My 1st Team Meeting.

• I was scared and nervous because it was my first time.
• I was practicing way to much and going over my lines, over and over again I think tats where I got my nervous feelings from. I wanted to deliver the way I practice, the more I was tiring to be someone else I was falling away from myself.
• I showed my weakness to the team which made me even more vulnerable and less confident, I place myself in a spotlight and didn't know how to get out of it. This made me even more nervous that, I totally lost confident in myself. 
• During the meeting, every lead was going over their tasks, and I wasn't paying attention to what they were saying but how they were delivering Thieu message. Man, by now my confident was gone, and its my turn to delver. Few guys made mocking eye contact with me where I am already cautious (funny those weird feelings are coming back as i write, but this is good that I can document it and learn from my past.)
• In my monthly report, my voice was shaking and I was getting into to much detailed on our teams status. There was a couple of times where my brain failed to think, which lead into a pause. Finally i finished my report, and I wasn't happy on what i said.
• I was not confident in what i was saying because i was paying attention to what people were thinking about me. I also learn to stay to the point and, deliver short and sweet.

My 2nd Team Meeting.

• This time my report was lot smoother then before, I was short and sweet, but I had a little bit of nervous pauses, but I never gave up. I needed to deliver this with full confident this time. 
• I had all my facts down and  made a really cool, management tool that help me break down everyone status. I gave their highlights and told them about whats coming next.
• Everyone was proud of me and my delivery, they saw my improvements and knew that I was committed in making a change to myself. Everyone was supportive this time and i didn't let them know I was nervous.
• So this was a great step for public speaking that next time I will be better.

Team Stand Up Format

When giving a brief update of what your working on, here are the bullet points to fill out, which helps drive your report.

• What I have done?
• What I'm doing now?
• What's coming Next?
• Is there anything blocking me?

Dragon Age Combat Design

I was really inspired by the way Mike Laidlaw Lead Designer, describes the combat design of his game.

-------------------------------------------

• When we sat down to design DA, i think were were trying to modernize a classic.
• Baulder's Gate 2 has always been a reference for us.
• That game always made you feel like your mixing classes, abilities, smart play.
• So we decided to modernize that.
• Realistic Combat Fighting styles
• the weight of the sword,smashing into a body.
• All of this was Key to us.
• I think what we resulted in is something satisfying to the hardcore gamers
• Reference Material
• you have to look at classics Lord of the rings, 300, and even the best fight scenes you see in the Conan movies
• this was a brutal time to be in and we wanted to evoke that feeling
• What we wanted to achieve
• was the sense you can be both the general, as well as they Guy who was leading the charge.
• so we put several systems, including the tactic system where you can control the AI of your characters
• and of course just smart reactions on the way the enemy occurs.
• so you kinda have that moment to plan, were you see the enemy thinking, how to i plan out this grand strategy, to make these character do as much damage as they can.
• once you charge in there the battle is a swarming melee.
• you have to position your characters, the rouge hey can attack the enemy from behind. you have the warrior holding the front lines where the mages holding the back line, just kinda like raining death.
• its very in your face when you engage.
• so you always have that little moment of I know whats coming and here's my plan.

----------------------------------------------------

• often what you want to do is deal with strategic impact of your equipment and the talents you have chosen, so you want to try and move your characters for massive effectiveness.
• all characters have a sense of whether their being flanked or whether if the enemy is directly behind them. you get direct bonuses to making those attacks from different type of arcs. even the sense of what weapon or what side you use id on can effect things like sweeping attacks, you can use walls or barriers that can protect you from on coming attacks, and things like elevation really play into the mechanics as well
• even what you were effects the tactics your going to employ in dragon age. the heaviest armor in game are going to protect you, but at at the same time they are going to slow you down. your going to be fatigue when your wearing them, you wont be able to pull of some of the special moves.
• finishing moves are to employ that the combat system has a momentum, finishing move is where you have an awesome moment where you see the sword goes through the enemy, or off comes his head. or possibly killing a really large creature by climbing on top of its head and jabbing your blade in.

---------------------------------

• and its not just about flash, as you ware your opponents down the game is dynamically adjusting the instances as this is happening, where we are essentially rewarding your combat dominance. when your opponents are worn down, the moral is starting to break and you are just crushing them on the battle field, you will notice that your characters are finishing them, with far more frequency. more hits come off, its pretty fantastic.
• designing combat is not just about the rules or couple of animations, its about the entire experience as far as I am concerned. when a player comes out of combat, what i really want is that sense of tension, and that feeling of wow look at what i just pulled off.
• I don't want to make a game where it feels as its soft balled, where yeah i just killed stuff again, No i want you to feel like you were rewarded for playing smart.
• One of the most exciting parts i think would be the war stories, the form Post the water coolers,
• people on the team are already talking about the ways they dealt with boss X. And that's pretty cool and very very rewarding. It feels that game the on that they played was for them.

10 things I contributed to Bioware

• Conversation System

We have 1000's of dialog , and since thats lot of content to animate, we came up with a tool that automatically generates animations that will support all that diolog in game. With the help of FaceFx and some of Bioware's great tools, we can generate correct phonemes based off of writing and audio VO, the system would randomly make the head move based off the stress waves from the VO, face expressions and behaviors will be generated from the symbolic punctuation marks. For example, if the sentence ends with (?) the facial gestures will randomly choose the facial features that best fits the (?), We got to a point where we are able to handle the basic (.)(?)(!). Once the Basics was all figured out and working, we expanded the horizon and added on mood type. Which branches out into other groups, Happy (.?!) Sad (.?!). The best part, this system can animate 100% of all our dialog, but we only want it to take care of 80%, while the 20% will be hand touch for best quality animation.

• Combat Flurry System
• Defined unique class combat styles
• Mocap combat and conversation system
• Polishing

Towards the end of the project, polishing plays a big roll. All the content that you have in the game has to look good and bug free. Pose polishing can take some time to fix, because fixing just one pose can cause a chain reaction, were you have to make those changes across hundred of animations that uses that pose.

• Pushing the MMO game to another level
• Skinning pipeline
• Puppetshop Techniques
• Understand how cinematic works in game
• Provide RnD with programmers and designers

Mocap Methods

A friend of mine told me about his Mocap Methods. Just to sum it up on what he did, get prepared on all the data they are going to get, getting the mocap on what they believe in, and being confident on the results they are going to get.

1. You must get as much as detail from the designers
2. Go over the details over and over
3. For every mocap that they were planning to get at the studio, they wanted to make sure they are not wasting time by thinking of ideas for a movement.
4. We needed to get male and female animations, so we thought of an idea to record them both together at the same time. this theory sounded really good, because you will be getting the movements from both actors at the same time and timing, but we tested this out in reality and it felt as if the director was giving 50/50 attention to both actors. We really want to invest in 100% attention.
5. Friend Quoted  "If you want me to direct, I need you to get off the floor." This is to make sure that there is only one cook in the kitchen, if there are more, chances are there is going to be disagreements and fighting for direction.
6. The mocap trip turned out great, I was really impressed with some of the data that came back. Not just the final content but also how it was organized. For example: dl_talk_1_2_3, was just an animation that had 3 variations of talking, I had to clean the mocap by putting on the correct stand pose and splitting the files up. I ended up making dl_talk_1, dl_talk_2, and 3, quick and easy.
7. Reference Reference Reference, coworker has a spreadsheet with all the documents that they go over with cinematic designers. All the data they need to get for mocap is fully documented and reviewed by making video clips of themselves. Designers need to approve the videos before getting the mocap.

So when ever you go out for mocap, you must be prepared and know what you are capturing.
1 Direction, Organized, and plenty of reference.