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, and keep an eye out for more from Soldier-of-Fortune.com in the very near future! 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. [Part Two of the Eric Turman Interview]