I worked on this game for three years over a decade ago. Now there’s a ‘making of’ video doing the rounds. It is a good game… it’s fascinating to see how well it holds up, and how in other areas it’s dated. About half the footage they used here was from my pre-rendered cut scenes. Some good, much of it looking a bit shaky now…. largely I’d put that down to not having the budget and the team size you’d expect on a project like this today (it was also my first time doing pre-rendered HD 3D as well). But I learned a lot from this and there were many, many improvements over what I’d been able to do in the real-time cut-scenes I did for Starfox Adventures (which was somewhat limited by starting out as a cartridge game on the N64). Anyway if anyone is wondering what the fuss is about go get the Rare Replay collection, Kameo is one of the best reasons to get it.
Way back in 2006 I spent six weeks helping out the animation crew working on Viva Pinata for the XBox 360. We were cast to different characters and I was animating the Robin. For some reason I never got around to putting any of this online, but it’s so cute I thought I’d put it out there. It’s the kind of stuff I would have put in my reel a while back but unfortunately there’s a bit of a bias against games animation (and unrendered shots) when you’re applying for non-games work, so I dropped all my games work from my main reel years ago. It’s a shame really… good animation is good animation, but unfortunately I’ve noticed you get more credit for sloppy animation rendered impressively. It’s not as bad as it was, I’ve definitely seen more acceptance of games work as valid animation in recent years, but it really depends who’s looking. Some people from Film and TV are still frequently quite biased against it and they close themselves off to talent without judging the animation on it’s own terms in many cases. I’ve noticed many games animators render their in-game animations now and find ways to blend them together […]
