Introduction & Career

My name is Simon Warwick and I’m a mentor of one of the animation courses at CG Spectrum. I started my career as a character animator and it evolved into a technical animation role over the years. My first couple of gigs after college in 2004 involved working with an Unreal Tournament mod team and contributing to some CG shots in an independent live-action film based in New York. Neither of them paid but it garnered the experience and demo reel to land a job at Silicon Knights as a character animator in 2005. By 2009, I had enough technical game development skills to get hired at Rocksteady as a senior technical animator. I was primarily responsible for converting facial motion capture into the game for Batman Arkham City. By 2013 my wife and I decided to move back to Canada to work freelance and develop independent projects under Collectivision Studios. During those years I spent time working with other developers using UE4. By 2015, I began mentoring full time at CG Spectrum but I still develop ideas within UE4 on the side.

Current State of Technologies

I’ve found that the new potential with implementing animations within UE4’s Blueprints has completely changed what an Animator is capable of. It’s been great being able to test out ideas and experiment without having to translate (and motivate) an animation programmer. However, it’s still quite a complex system to understand for the average animator so I find it’s not something that fits everyone’s interest.

As a mentor, I still struggle to find reliable rigging systems for the students that are simple to set up, easy to animate with and also compatible as a game rig. There are some concepts floating around about integrated animation rigging systems within the editor and it’s appealing because it can solve these compatibility issues for animators. However, competing with the current animation workflows within software like Maya or Motionbuilder is still a tall order to fill.

Cinematic vs. Game Animation

The pipelines for cinematic and game animation can be completely separate. Cinematic animation has a goal of explaining something to the player that the player can’t do with gameplay. This involves longer clips of straight motion capture that are assembled where camera angles and traditional filming techniques drive the viewer. In-game animations are heavily manipulated short clips where animators are making changes based on feedback from those implementing and designing the gameplay. Gameplay animations can sometimes be quite abstract as it only represents a portion of an action that is blended into the currently playing skeletal mesh.