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Page 1 of 2
Interview by 'Soultaker'
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The following is the very first Soldier of Fortune interview
- with Eric 'Turmanator' Turman, conducted by SoulTaker. Eric
is the Senior Animator on Soldier of Fortune. Hope you enjoy
the interview!
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SoulTaker: First off, could you give a short description of who you
are as well as what you do for Raven
and for Soldier of Fortune?
Turmanator: I got into 3D animation about 6 years ago when Brian
Shubat and I tried to get a commercial animation business started. We've
used tons of different animation packages but struck gold when we got a
chance 3 years ago to use Softimage|3D.
I came to Raven 16 months ago when my high school art teacher, Brian
Raffel, hired me to animate on the Hexen II Mission Pack. I like
to approach animation from the creative and technical end, by creating tools
to simplify the workflow for myself and other animators here. I've modeled
the enemies, set up the animation control system, and modeled some of the
in-game / in-view weapons. I'd like to take a moment to mention the core
SoF group:
Eric Biessman, Project Leader / Lead Designer, is responsible
for making sure the game gets done in good stead.
Rick Johnson is the Lead Programmer, responsible for the cohesion
of all the game code in SoF, as well as the awesome new in-game
scripting.
Scott Rice is responsible for making sure all the artwork is
complete and looks good in the game.
I'm accountable to Scott to insure that the animations are completed -
and of course, that they look good in the game. In addition to myself
and Jarrod Showers, the following people have worked on the animations
for SoF:
Brian Shubat, Jeff DeWitt, and Rob Gee.
SoulTaker: I've heard that motion capture will be used in SoF.
Is this true?
Turmanator: Yes and no. We do have motion capture data that we
are using for a base to give animations a biological feel. However, I've
made a very flexible system (null hierarchy) that allows the artist to
animate on top of the motion capture data; it even gives more control
than we've had for previous standard hand animation setups. The best thing
is that the animator never has to touch the mocap data to change it...we
just tweak on top of it. There is also a significant amount of pure hand
animation to compliment the altered motion capture.
SoulTaker: Just what exactly is motion capture?
Turmanator: In the most basic terms, mocap (motion capture) is
recording someone's movement into the computer. A stuntperson (Barton
Smith for the bulk of our moves for SoF) put on a black lycra suit
with reflective silver balls on all of his joints. Surrounding the actor
in a circle are seven video cameras, each with red strobing lights that
feed info into a computer, controlled by a technician. The computer compares
the glowing dots and places them in 3D space. Another technician connects
the constellation of dots (the foot dot is connected to the ankle dot,
etc.) and makes sure that the move will work.
SoulTaker: How much work is involved doing motion capture?
Turmanator: There's a lot of pre-planning. Scott Rice and I had
to try and think of all the possible actions that we wanted the characters
to go through. Then we had to sift out which ones would be most economical
to do by hand. Next, the ones slotted for mocap were organized on a list
and sent out to the mocap house. Two days were scheduled for the capture
session; now it was time to select talent to act out the moves. I started
to work on our end of the "pipeline" (getting their data into a state
that could be put into the game). Scott and I flew out to LA to supervise
the session and get some technicalities ironed out. Capturing the data
was a pretty intense couple of days (I had never been to California. And
I still don't know what it looks like). Barton Smith, the stuntman that
we hired, suited up and we proceeded to shoot the moves. The second day
we finished up with Barton and then captured a couple of females to get
their nuances. It felt like we were making a movie really. You'd hear
"Soldier of Fortune move 117a take one... Action! .... Cut!"
Scott really filled the role of director well; we got all required moves
plus the ones on our wish list. When we got back, Scott reviewed all of
the takes making certain that the ones that we had bested were indeed
the ones that we wanted (asking my opinion occasionally), while I finished
and tweaked our pipeline. Then the processed moves started to roll in.
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