Archive for June, 2004 Page 3 of 6

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Death to Sierra, No Work for Me

Published
by
Danny
on June 22, 2004
in General
. Closed

The rumors were flying around this weekend, and now, here is the confirmation. Vivendi Universal Games finally closes Sierra. You can read more on the topic here:

CNN Money – Vivendi cuts 40 percent of U.S. gaming workforce

Why am I writing about this today? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, I was at Dynamix when Vivendi Universal purchased Sierra. Within a year of that purchase, VU closed Dynamix as part of its “restructuring”. That put a lot of strong developers out of work for a while.

The circumstances surrounding the closure were kind of nasty, because we, the employees of the company, found out from sources outside of Dynamix that the closure was imminent. On the Friday before the official announcement, management closed Dynamix for the afternoon and immediately disabled all keycards with very little notice. People were told to leave the building until further notice. It was rather unpleasant for most of us.

I have no love for VU or even Sierra at that. Neither group of managers was particularly supportive of developers, and both were in it purely for the money. I can’t really blame them for that. They are all business people, of course. But, having worked in the trenches and felt the trickle down effect of their decisions, I can honestly say that VU can burn in hell.

Regardless of what VU did and why, most of us came out of the closure of Dynamix just fine. People either moved on to other companies, started their own companies, or changed careers. I went on to do more teaching and went back to freelance work. It was a good change for me at the time.

Now, the second reason I’m writing about this, and probably more immediately important, is the fact that all of the animation work I have been doing for the past couple of months was for a Sierra project. With Sierra closing its doors in 60 days, they cancelled the project yesterday. I received notice this morning, and, needless to say, I’m not particularly pleased about it. I am now on the job hunt again, and, with all of Sierra now back on the job market, competition in the Seattle area is going to be even tougher than before.

So, now that my freelance contract has been terminated, it’s time to update the demo reel and send out the job applications. And how nice of this to happen this close to my birthday.

Deadline in Two Days, Class on Friday

Published
by
Danny
on June 21, 2004
in General
. Closed

Six more animations are off the list; 12 if you count the retargetted animations. The flashbang reactions are done, so I only have the gas reactions left to do by Wednesday. I’m excited about finishing this milestone. All of these reaction animations were tough to do, and they took a lot longer than I had anticipated. This Wednesday means that I’ll be done with these animations, and I get to move on to other work for a little bit.

This Friday I’ll be teaching an online animation class for Pussan National University in South Korea. It will the be the first of two 4-hour workshops that will focus on timing for animation. It’ll basically be my old Intro to Animation class but taught in front of a video camera that is broadcasting a live video conference signal to a classroom in Korea.

It should be an interesting experience. Not only will I be lecturing to a camera and not have the students directly in front of me, but I’ll be answering questions and whatnot via ICQ. I’m not sure how it’s all going to fit together, but the previous courses in this online program seem to be working just fine. It will be nice to be teaching again.

Milestone is Almost Done

Published
by
Danny
on June 21, 2004
in General
. Closed

Super super super productive day today. Despite the insane heat, I managed to complete the last few prolonged hit reaction animations and retarget all 35 of those animations onto the second character. It was an insane undertaking, but I came through strong. Not only did I have to export and retarget the animations, I actually had to go through and tweak all the hand motions for the second character, because the proportions of the two characters are slightly different. But I survived. The animations are done, they’ve been uploaded to the server, and now I can move on to the next set.

The next set of animations should go fairly quickly. They’re just different variations on the character reacting to flash and gas attacks. Lots of stunned looks and coughing motions. Once those are completed, this milestone will be complete. The animations for the next milestone should be really fun – walk and run cycles, kicking things, flipping tables over, etc. Can’t wait for those.

Tough Animations, Long Day

Published
by
Danny
on June 19, 2004
in General
. 1 Comment

The goal for today was to complete at least 2 of the 4 getting up animations. The character begins in 1 of 4 lying down positions face down, back, left side, and right side. He needs to get up and go into the neutral kneeling pose to blend into other animations. Doesn’t sound too difficult right?

Wrong. It was actually a lot harder than I thought. It took me 3 hours just to rough out the easiest of the bunch: getting up from the face down position. While the poses themselves weren’t all that hard to setup, adjusting the timing between the poses was quite difficult. I think a lot of the trouble came from having to constantly counter-animate the character as I was adjusting the timing. I wanted parts to lock down and not move when I adjusted another part. I fought with the Character Studio for a while then eventually accepted the oddities of working with it (something I probably should’ve done weeks ago…).

Once I tamed/accepted the controls, things moved much more smoothly. I actually managed to do 3 animations today. It took me 9 hours to get everything done, though, but I was able to spend the whole day doing nothing but animation. Surprisingly, I’ve been approaching these animations in a straight-ahead fashion instead of my usual pose-to-pose process. Naturally, I use a mix of the two while I work, but I generally start with pose-to-pose then move on to straight-ahead runs. With these animations, however, I started with a straight-ahead run of the whole sequence then went back through to fine tune timing. My animation mojo was definitely flowing today. I didn’t have to start over on anything. I just hammered straight through and got the animations.

The 9-hour animation spree today (with a few breaks here and there for food and the calls of nature) was almost a Zen-like experience for me. I was able to focus on the animation at hand without falling prey to the distractions around me: IRC, email, iChat – things I probably should’ve left off while working. Not once did I have to start over or trash large parts of the sequences I was working on. I just posed the character, moved a few frames down the timeline, set another pose, moved more frames, posed again, et al. It felt very natural to be animating today, despite the fact that I was using Character Studio.

So, I beat my goal for today and didn’t lose any hair over it. I don’t feel like it was particularly stressful. I don’t even feel exhausted. Today was a good animation day.

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