Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed was developed for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS and PC. The third-person adventure lets players climb walls, buildings, ledges, steep paths and platforms. Its character-control system was created through a production pipeline that included Autodesk 3ds Max for modelling, animation and rendering, MotionBuilder for character animation, and HumanIK middleware integrated into the game engine. 3ds Max was used to create three-dimensional characters and environments. Both 3ds Max and MotionBuilder handled in-game character animation, while HumanIK provided a complete inverse-kinematics system.
“For games such as Assassin’s Creed that use a great deal of motion capture, the pipeline from MotionBuilder to 3ds Max is extremely efficient,” says Ubisoft Animation Project Manager Elspeth Tory. “We collected the data on our motion-capture stage, refined the animation in MotionBuilder and finally transferred it into 3ds Max. 3ds Max is ideally suited to game development and helped us produce sequences at a breathtaking pace. HumanIK made the game strikingly realistic while allowing us to give the main character the greatest possible freedom of movement throughout every game environment.”
Infinity Ward used Maya to model and texture every prop, vehicle and character in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 first-person shooter was the first Call of Duty title not set during the Second World War and featured several locations.
“For Call of Duty 4, we had to reinvent the Call of Duty series completely. Building on their experience with Maya from earlier Call of Duty games, our artists created a realistic modern world from scratch,” explains Lead Character Artist Joel Emslie. “We made full use of Maya’s strengths, from polygon modelling to our first attempts at using motion capture as an animation technique. Maya’s Surface Sampler proved the best solution for projecting robust normal maps onto our geometry. The flexibility of Maya in this area is unbeatable.”
Mass Effect, an action role-playing game developed by BioWare for Xbox 360, was produced with 3ds Max and Autodesk Mudbox. “We created every character, weapon, interactive object and environment in 3ds Max,” says Lead Technical Artist Adrien Cho. “The characters modelled in 3ds Max were then detailed in Mudbox to create sophisticated, lifelike scenarios and realistic emotions.” The team also used 3ds Max for character animation and motion design.
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe used Maya during development of Heavenly Sword for PlayStation 3. Ambient-occlusion maps were central to the game’s visual appearance because they generated soft contact shadows for objects and environments. Maya and mental ray’s map-baking functions provided a fast way to create the maps. Maya’s Transfer Maps tool also generated ambient occlusion and transferred it from high-polygon to low-polygon models.
Flagship Studios based the Hellgate: London production chain around 3ds Max. The studio used the application to model many of the demons and human survivors populating its post-apocalyptic London. “3ds Max offers a powerful, flexible and open environment that provides exceptional capabilities for every aspect of game development,” says Flagship Art Director and co-founder Phil Shink. “It is excellent for level creation, character modelling and animation. MAXScript also allows us to develop a large proportion of our art tools directly inside the application.”
Insomniac Games used Maya to create Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction for PlayStation 3. Artists modelled character and environment elements, prepared UVs, assigned shaders and precomputed dynamics for large destructible objects in Maya.
Naughty Dog used Maya for almost every aspect of the Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune production pipeline. Developers created thousands of character and enemy animations, while the cinematic team produced one hour of real-time film in less than a year. Detailed environments and backgrounds combined custom tools with Maya file referencing, allowing the studio to build levels described as one hundred times more detailed than those in its previous games.
Autodesk’s game-development portfolio included 3ds Max and Maya for 3D modelling, animation and rendering, MotionBuilder for character animation, Mudbox for digital modelling, and HumanIK middleware.
