zoober.net

Some production art guides!

 

It was a bit of a rough haul, but Mass Effect 3 has finally been released!

Been out almost a week now and we have received some great reviews so far. Very proud to have been part of a very talented group of animators on this project.

5/5 G4TV
100% GameInformer
100% Eurogamer

This guy really knows how to take a seemingly simple idea and execute on it beautifully.

With Dragon Age 2 out the door, I along with the rest of the BioWare cinematics team have moved on to the finale of the Mass Effect trilogy.

The Cinematic Animators up here at BioWare Edmonton and BioWare Montreal have been producing some amazing stuff for the series third installment. The project is incredibly ambitious and I can already tell that it is shaping up to be one of the best titles that BioWare has ever shipped.

I have also decided to enroll in some workshops over at iAnimate.net. I'm a couple of weeks into the program and so far I'm having a blast doing some character driven keyframe work outside of what I usually deal with at BioWare.



It's difficult to describe just how much I miss doing keyframe animation in Maya... There are a lot of working professionals in the different workshops at iAnimate and the caliber of the student work in the program has been truly inspiring and motivating. I should have some work in progress assignments to show here on the blog sometime in the future.

Dragon Age 2 on Xbox360 Playstation 3 and PC is out in stores now! The last year was pretty wild up here at BioWare for the Dragon Age team, but the game turned out great, I personally think it's a great iteration on the original Dragon Age.

Some Reviews:

5/5 Escapist Magazine
94% PC Gamer Magazine
90% Official Playstation Magazine
97% Time Magazine
95% Gamefront

Time for a long overdue update!

The latest project that I'm working on up here at Bioware is Dragon Age 2. We just recently released our first cinematic trailer while the Gamescom conference in Germany was going on.



Between Dragon Age 2 and my wife giving birth to a a beautiful baby girl in June, this summer has been quite the adventure. Schedules at home are starting to return to normal again and we're finally catching up on sleep, so I'm looking forward to having some time to animate at home once more and blogging about what's going on.

Not sure why, but I love these advertisements for the new Honda Crosstour. Great music accompanied by some snappy graphic rendered animation.










*Update, added the "Snow Trip".

Things have been crazy over the last few months. Tons of stuff going on up at Bioware in Edmonton. Dragon Age: Origins hit the streets in November and received an amazing reception! We have a 91 rating on Metacritic and have received some glowing reviews. I put just about 3 years of work into the title and it has been extremely satisfying to hear how much the fans are enjoying the game.

Immediately after wrapping up Dragon Age: Origins I was put to work on the first retail expansion for the game which we just announced this week. Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening.



I am proud to say that I was given a great amount of responsibility as the lone cinematic animator on the expansion pack. I had the pleasure of working directly with the talented writing and design crew to put together just under 8 minutes of the key cinematic scenes in the game.

It's quite rare these days to be given a script on a large project that you get to storyboard, animate and even light and composite. Bioware is one of the few big studios where an animator can actually take his own shots entirely from script to screen. It was a valuable experience and I can't wait to show some of the amazing new stuff we have coming down the pipe.

Another collection of great shorts by Gobelins for 2009's Annecy Animation Film festival.

A couple more great student films from the 2009 Cal Arts Prudcers Show.


A Werewolf Film by Noel Belknap

Study Hall by Jeff Liu