Realtime #
Starfield #
In addition to the rigging and animation, a large portion of these creatures had at least some dynamic component, either in the form of simple spring bones or full-on havok setups (like the ‘Aceles’ creature pictured here). I was responsible for most of these setups. Simulated motion was very useful to differentiate creatures that shared the same animations, as all the aliens had flaps, antennae, gas bags, tentacles, gelatinous eyeballs, and all manner of unique traits that simply couldn’t be animated by hand given the timeframe. Each of the 100+ creature variants also required a custom ragdoll setup to accomodate its unique shape.
I was also responsible for the Havok cloth and ragdoll setup on a few dozen of the outfits and hairstyles in the game that required dynamic motion. The added challenge here was each outfit had to work on male and female player models, both with multiple body size morphs. This turned each single outfit into many “sub outfits”.
Doom: The Dark Ages #
The id Software engineers came in clutch for Bethesda and, to return the favor, the tech art team was lent to id to help with Doom: The Dark Ages.
Most of my time helping was spent consulting on Havok Cloth integration (this was a new feature for id tech). I was given the “Acolyte” demon asset to implement because it was a “all but the kitchen sink” of cloth. At the time it was unclear whether cloth would be worth it for the game but, given the barbarian-esque aesthetics, the team wanted to see if it would work (it did).
Because of the extremely fast-paced motion in the game the simulation had to partially follow character transforms and be constrained to not fly apart but still given enough freedom to look realistic. This setup ended up including every trick in the book including multiple cloth sets, a special cloth state for demon “teleporting”, faking multilayer self-collision with Havok buffers, zero-gravity cloth blended with animation on the head tentacles, as well as jewelry and small secondary motion.
This was a huge privilege for me, as Doom was the original reason I got into computer graphics. The team at id was a joy to work with.
Pre-rendered #
Blizzard Cinematics #
At Blizzard I worked on the cinematics team, and was responsible for hair, cloth, and crowd simulation on various characters and shots.
Most cloth, hair, and dragon wing simulation was done with Maya Nucleus cloth. Often additional sculpting of the motion was done using a custom push + noise deformer that allowed an artist to “paint” and animate deformations on top of the cloth simulation.
I also created tools that allowed simulation artists to run and preview their sims on the renderfarm using Tractor.
For “Wrath of the Lich King” I created a custom ‘dynamics force’ that used the derivative of a noise field, also called “curly noise”, to push hair and particles in interesting ways. This allowed for a more realistic hair simulation when using Maya’s legacy dynamics system. The FX artists (not me) were also able to use this to make swirly snow with Maya particles.
Barnyard #
My first job in the industry was working as a Hair Artist, and later as a General TD, on the Paramount/Nickelodeon movie “Barnyard”. This was a very chaotic and interesting job; a great first job.
The movie was made in Softimage XSI, using Syflex for cloth simulation. Syflex was used to simulate cloth, long hair, and the gold chains on Biggie Cheese. Little did I know that later he would become meme legend.