RE5 character animations and rigging

Xoliul

So I'm playing some Resident Evil 5 on Xbox, and there's this boss that really makes me wonder how they did such a thing in realtime
Watch this video to see what i'm talking about:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VCUL5N91gU[/ame]

I'm curious, how do they rig such an insane thing for realtime use ? Seems like a daunting thing for software rendering already. Would it be all baked animation? And what about those parts it keeps losing ?

Ark

Capcom always amaze me with there monsters. This must be one of the most technologically impressive monsters ever.

Iirc correctly there was an article on Softimage's website about RE5, but i can't seem to find it since Autodesk bought them and deleted most of Softimages orginal site content.

I remember reading about some saying that the secondary movements where all shader driven, can't really elaborate any more as i know very little about animation.

FicWill

Lots of scrolling UVs.

MoP

Yeah it looked like a fair bit of scrolling UV shaders to me, and for stuff like the snakey bits getting shot off, that'd be a simple particle effect spawned at the point of impact (could be animating sprites, just a few frames playing and rotating the polygon), or could be simple models spawned in the particle effect.

I think the best thing is how integrated and consistent it all is - it's a very good blend of animation, modelling, texturing and shaders which add up to a very cinematic experience. A lot of the time, animation/modelling/shader work is done separately and it can be hard to get everything to fit together smoothly but it's fairly clear they had a bunch of people who knew their stuff collaborating to make this awesome creature.

Slum

MoP wrote: »

Yeah it looked like a fair bit of scrolling UV shaders to me, and for stuff like the snakey bits getting shot off, that'd be a simple particle effect spawned at the point of impact (could be animating sprites, just a few frames playing and rotating the polygon), or could be simple models spawned in the particle effect.

I think the best thing is how integrated and consistent it all is - it's a very good blend of animation, modelling, texturing and shaders which add up to a very cinematic experience. A lot of the time, animation/modelling/shader work is done separately and it can be hard to get everything to fit together smoothly but it's fairly clear they had a bunch of people who knew their stuff collaborating to make this awesome creature.

Yeah, for sure. It's definitely one of the more technically impressive creature I've seen in a while.

achillesian

the final boss in conan is very similar to this with tentacles in shit, except it came out 2 years prior to this

Ani

There's a case study on Resident Evil 5 at the japanese Softimage website
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A//www.softimage.jp/user_case/biohazard5/index.html&hl=en&langpair=auto|en&tbb=1&ie=Shift_JIS

Ark

Ani wrote: »

There's a case study on Resident Evil 5 at the japanese Softimage website
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A//www.softimage.jp/user_case/biohazard5/index.html&hl=en&langpair=auto|en&tbb=1&ie=Shift_JIS

Thanks for that, been looking for all these case studies since they went down on the official site.

Xoliul

Great find! Hard to read the part on Ouroboros though, with that shoddy translation.
I do find "Anbientookuryujon" hilarious

MoP- exactly. These Japanese studios really do things very professionally, but insight into their pipelines seems limited to only these features on softimage's site. I remember being amazed by that MGS4 feature and reading stuff like Snake's face texture being only a 512...

edit: okay the movies load here at home, that one with the tentacles is fascinating!

If I get this right, they're using a "Pasukonsutorein" or path constraint for the automatic jiggling, and then a second layer of controls to actually move them. Makes me want to try and build this sort of rig! Still not really sure how you'd build these controls in Max...