Category — General

As part of our epic questing in this era of video game creation, we are required to battle many fiendish processes that require lots of pre-planning, problem solving and general complex noodling. In this post, I am going to talk about one of those processes, specifically getting the visual richness of high polygon count geometry into a game that only supports a very limited polygon count. Don’t be fooled, there is a lot of steps in-between that requires a lot of attention, so if your not feeling like the sharpest tool in the shed, go get a coffee and come back when you feeling like a cognitive ninja.

Four low-poly critters, don’t let the cuteness fool you, they will bite…hard

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Today we are going to share some development background on our new iPhone game Roc Pazzo, which should be in the app store soon.

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When I began this post, I was going to write about bands that had in some way animated themselves for either film or television. And while that’s still totally doable, I got caught instead on the notion of pseudo-fictional animated bands instead – bands that (while obviously having real-world musicians providing the sounds) exist primarily as animation.

Because really, if there’s anything better than listening to music, it can only be listening to music while watching cartoons.
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A while back we heard from Aldrich about how to animate movement, and how (and why) to make that movement convincing. But what about the models themselves? What about the actual appearance of what you’re animating? If you’re going to be animating something’s movement in a realistic way, surely you want that thing to look as realistic as possible, right?

Good god man, no!
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This morning, Adam (Walker, that is) came in to work bright and early to find the door already unlocked and swinging in the breeze. Thoughts immediately turned to burglary, but nothing seemed to be missing. While checking on the whereabouts of the office silverware, however, he came across Adam (Reed, now), surrounded by piles of iPhones and engrossed in a frenzy of sleep-coding.

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Film something. Project it onto some paper or view it through an animation cell. Now, trace and draw over what you’re looking at, frame by frame. Hey, you’re rotoscopin’ now, baby!

I love rotoscoped animation for that odd, almost too-fluid sense of movement that it imparts. It’s been used extensively in film, television, music videos and video games, and I thought I’d talk about it a bit, and share some of my favourite examples of the technique. Take it away, me! [Read more →]

Here at AWS there’s a lot of jazz about these computers with their megabytes and such. It’s enough to make a man grimace with techno-angst.

Obviously, Adam and the boys mainly focus their efforts on 2 and 3D Animation, and what with the world being the way it is, this is all done with horrible whirring boxes of inevitable doom that one day will rise up to kill us all. Good one, Adam. Hasn’t the man seen Terminator?

Which brings me to my love of one of the oldest of schools of animation, stop-motion. A while back on the AWS Facebook page I introduced stop-motion Sundays, linking to clips and short films featuring wobbly, jerky models.

Now realistically, I’ll not bore you with a how-it’s-done, as every man and his cat can work that out. Instead, I thought I’d showcase a few videos from three of my favourite stop-motion animators
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+ Considering the release of AWS’s take on The Owl and the Pussycat a few weeks ago, and bearing in mind that the studio is primarily comprised of 3D animators, I thought I’d talk to AWS animator Trent Leighton about his experience branching out into the realm of 2D.

2D animation often appears less complex than it’s 3D counterpart. But is that the reality?

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So you have an idea for a great piece of animation. How do you actually take that idea, and turn it into a final, fully developed work?

Lead animator Aldrich knows precisely how, and in this video breakdown of one of the scenes from Arcade Trap, he takes us step-by-step through the processes involved.

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