RipTen Videogame Blog » animation

Guild Wars 2 Displays Updated Cinematic Conversations

Jensen Walker — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 02:00:54 +0000

Another day, another Arenanet blog. In the latest entry from Guild Wars 2 designer Chuck Jackman, the process of directing motion capture and creating animation is explained, with the previous ‘placeholder’ cutscenes witnessed in earlier builds replaced by a more polished version which utilizes lip syncing, body gestures and facial expressions.

The blog is fairly lengthy and focuses on the technical aspects of the animation process, but if that’s not for you, feel free to enjoy the two videos below which highlight the recent changes. If you’re up for an extended read, you can view the blog via this link.

Obsidian Adapting Big Name Cartoon Franchise to Video Games

Justin Carter — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 01:15:30 +0000

Developer Obsidian Entertainment of Fallout: New Vegas and Knights of the Old Republic II fame is working on a new game. But rather than it being a side story to well established franchise like New Vegas, or them taking over a franchise like with KOTOR II, they’re working on bringing a “leading animation franchise” to the gaming environment.

Game-centric talent agency Digital Development Management listed Obsidian as “working on an unannounced project for a leading animation franchise. Video games and licensed products, with the obvious exception of Batman, go about as well together as fireworks and a clown with poor juggling skills. It starts off as a good idea, but the end product is something more often than not pretty horrible. Usually, it’s because of the property. Let’s face it, Family Guy doesn’t exactly scream video game material, or MMO for that matter.

If I had to make a guess, part of me wants to think it’ll be Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time. The show is quickly gaining some steam, has an Emmy under its belt, and the creator admitted that it’d be cool to have a video game in the land of Ooo. What animation franchise do you think it’ll be? Leave your comments below.

[Via Game Informer]

Ubisoft developing Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs game

Dan Landis — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:34:05 +0000

Ubisoft announced today that they are developing a video game based on the upcoming Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation CG film, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Ubisoft has partnered with Sony Pictures Animation previously for the video games based off of Surf’s Up and Open Season.

“We’re pleased to continue our successful partnership with Sony Pictures Consumer Products,” said Christian Salomon, vice president of worldwide licensing at Ubisoft. “Our teams are looking forward to creating a game that will offer parents and children an entertaining experience that they can share together while reliving their favorite moments from the film.”

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is scheduled to release later this year alongside the theatrical realease of the film, which opens September 18. The game will be available on consoles and handhelds, and will most likely be full of easy achievements/trophies so that people will actually play it.

Street Fighter Stop Motion Action Figure Video

Chad Lakkis — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:12:47 +0000

Look out Tim Burton, the guys over at Pushing Play have got some stop animation Street Fighter action for your ass. Check out the boys and their toys in the video above and make sure to head on over there and show them some love. Cheesy beat box sounds for the win!

Paper Mega Man in Stop Motion Animated Video

Chad Lakkis — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:04:54 +0000

The retro awesomeness you are about to witness is titled “Megaman 9 – Rockin in paper” and the creation of Nicolas Ménard. It pits a paper Mega Man in a real world adventure made up of everyday objects such as legos, cereal boxes, and a giant paper cutter. Brilliant.

Maybe this will inspire Capcom to create their own LittleBigPlanet type level editor for the blue bomber. Hit the jump to see paper Mega Man in action.

Source: capcom-unity.com

Miyamoto Joins Three of His Video Game Creations in a Legendary Animated Short

Chad Lakkis — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 23:39:30 +0000

Shigeru Miyamoto teams up with a trio of video game characters he created in an impressive short illustrated and animated by Newgrounds user, Awkward-Squid.

The concept behind the flash animation, titled “Legend of Miyamoto”, involves Mario, Link, and Donkey Kong helping their video game father make his way through their world. Squid says that the work was rushed a bit due to the fact it was being done as a university assignment, but I think it turned out great.

Check it out after the jump.

Make sure to head on over to Awkward-Squid’s user page and show him some love for this awesome piece of work.

Source: GoNintendo.com

Madagascar 2 Screens Portend Whimsical Nonsense

Andrew Podolsky — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:38:23 +0000

When Madagascar was in theaters, way back in 2005, I suspect that the main thing all the kids in the audience took away from it was the hideously annoying “We like to move it, move it” ditty that sticks in your head like a piece of shrapnel. The song’s prominence in the trailer to the sequel confirms that this is, in fact, one of the most insidious examples of psychological song warfare ever perpetrated on our nation’s youth.

But that’s neither here nor there. All I’m saying is, even money, there will probably be some sort of Dance Dance Revolution minigame set to that tune in this game. I’m not sure what else will be in the game, but from the look of these screenshots, it’s all over the place. Life-sized chessboards with gaping chasms? Zebras playing soccer? Penguins in jeeps? It’s a madhouse!

Check out the new screens on the next page.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa comes out this fall, on nearly every system imaginable.

The Hypocrisy Surrounding Bewbs

Dan Landis — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:34:26 +0000

This is apparently not an encounter most people would enjoy.

There has been a lot of hubbub recently concerning the depiction of naked female boobage in the recently released MMO Age of Conan. U.S. gamers fought to keep the nipples in the game, but now it appears they don’t want to actually see them. What gives?

I recently received a copy of Age of Conan (thanks Zungre!) and immediately made a female character to check out what the big deal is. In respectable fashion, I named my avatar Bewbs. The character starts the game in essentially a swimsuit, and that’s just not my style so I took it off.

I ran through the little starter area topless, picking up loin cloths, weapons, gold teeth, and a few chest pieces which I refused to wear. That’s just not how Bewbs rolls. I finally make it to the first little multiplayer hub, the city of Tortage, and find myself assaulted by a good number of people who are apparently not happy to see Bewbs.

The first player to talk to me in the game called me a dumbass. I asked him why I was a dumbass and he said it was because I was topless. See the following screenshot for a brief snippet of our conversation:

I obviously blurred out the irrelevant “New Player” chat channel, and I thought about blurring out this dude’s name to protect the stupid, but you know what? Fuck that guy.

I asked him if he knew anything about the Conan universe and he didn’t respond. I asked him how old he was and he didn’t respond. I asked him why he was playing an M-rated game if he didn’t want to see boobs. He responded, finally, and said that he likes M-rated games for the violence, and he prefers this game over World of Warcraft because of the blood and dismemberment.

Here we go again… Why is it that people are okay with chopping off heads, but seeing some titties bothers them? Doesn’t that seem backwards? After the nerd outcry on the AoC forums at the thought of removing boobs from the U.S. version, we Freedom Fries-eating gamers got our way. After all of that, however, we are apparently not happy to see the nipples we fought so hard to keep.

After I thought about this, I began to wonder why this is occurring. Why do WoW gamers get upset when they see an elf dancing on a mailbox in her underwear? Why now do people yell at me for having my fun-bags out? To be honest, I have no answer to these questions.

It’s obvious that the women of AoC go topless quite often, or at the very least they don’t wear bras. You can see evidence of this in the lack of tanlines and the overall low-set positioning of their boobs. Those puppies are apparently not very often supported.

After running around the town for a little while, I noticed something else: I was the only female player character. I sat at the entrance to the town for a good 15 minutes, watching as people came in and left, waiting for another pair of boobs. I never saw them. Every other player character that I noticed during my playtime so far has been male.

So what’s the deal here? What is going on with this community of gamers? I read recently that the character animations for females supposedly take 25% longer, which means they attack 25% slower and do 25% less damage in the same amount of time compared to the men. This has yet to be officially confirmed, but FunCom is “looking into it”.

Could this be the reason there are no females, or is there something decidedly more sexist going on? Do people not want to roll a chick because they are “inferior”, because they don’t want people to ask to see their boobs, or is it because they want to roleplay as a man and get the chicks as opposed to playing as one?

My character doesn’t wear a top because I choose not to, not that it would do much good anyways since I’m a magic-user that can only equip cloth armor. I would much rather just distract my enemies with my awesome tits. This is an option, by design, that FunCom put in the game, so why does anyone care if I’m exposed, and why the fuck are these people playing a Conan game if they don’t want to see naked breasts!? Conan, by definition, means “topless”, both men and women. Conan without boobs is like Batman without a batsuit.

What do you think about Age of Conan’s boobs? What about sex in games in general? Do you think Microsoft will allow boobs in the Xbox 360 version of the game, and given this experience, do you think it even matters?

“Kings of Power 4 Billion %” Loosed on the Internets

Emily Balistrieri — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:44:34 +0000

Fans of Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006 probably already know, but Paul Robertson’s latest animated brawler short, Kings of Power 4 Billion %, is powerhousing its way through the tubes.

Not for the faint of heart, as it features heaped helpfuls of stylish violence, you can watch the video below.

Oh and if you can stomach bloody guts, it’s definitely worth a download to better take in the details.

Ripten’s Uncharted Interview Tease: “Ingame and Cutscene Models the Same”

Patrick Steen — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:26:48 +0000

We are very lucky at Ripten to be joined by Naughty Dog’s Lead Character Artist, Richard Diamant, for an exclusive interview about his work on Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

Richard also divulges on the game’s art style, animation, and technical details never revealed before. After his views on improvements for Naughty Dog’s next game, we wander onto the advantages of Blu-ray and their relationship with Insomniac. Enjoy this preview of our three part interview.

Patrick: The characters in Uncharted are some of the most impressive video game models to date. They look even more impressive up close in the cutscenes. Are the in-game models any different from the cutscene models?

Richard: Thanks! Nope, the in game models are the exact same models that are used in the cutscenes. They also use the exact same textures. There really is no difference between them at all.

The only difference between the cutscenes and in game is a little higher quality lighting and shadowing. Hopefully not too noticeably different. We really wanted to keep the players immersed as much as possible. This meant using the same assets across the board.

Patrick: What sets the character models apart from many other games is that it’s very hard to see a polygon edge. How did you achieve such smooth models?

Richard: That was actually one of the trickier things to nail down. It’s also one of the things that we really wanted to focus on.

If you watch the first E3 trailer that was released a couple years ago, you can actually see some polygon stepping in the head of Nathan Drake. That was the first iteration of Nate’s head where I really tried to keep the polys to a minimum for performance sake.

Unfortunately this did not hold up as nicely as we wanted. We all felt seeing any kind of stepping took us out of the experience. So we decided that the characters needed more polygons to get rid of, or at least to minimize, the amount of hard edges seen.

So really to answer the question, its all about the polygons. Nathan Drake and the other main characters are in the upwards of 25k to 30k polygons. Probably one of the highest for a next gen game. It really wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing programmers and engine as well as the sheer power of the PS3. I know that term goes around a lot but really, the machine is a beast!

That’s the end of our preview, but make sure to join us tomorrow for the first extract from our three part interview with Richard Diamant. In the mean time why not read our review of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, or have a look at Richard’s impressive work.