Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 09 December 2008 10:52
Opinion and Analysis
Page 4 of 5
“HumanIK or HIK has appeared in Ubisofts Assassins Creed, both for bipeds and quadrupeds; it is used in a lot of the EA sports games. And what HIK is, if you have ever been playing a game where the characters seem robotic, and their back doesn’t quite bend with the reach of their arm, reaching from their shoulder rather than with their whole body. Inverse Kinematics, and fully body IK that HIK does enables a character to respond and reach very naturally. The combination of HIK and Kynapse enable characters to respond in a natural way to their environment.”
iTWire: So is this a step beyond motion capture that we see in game development today?
M-BH: “I don’t see motion capture going away; you can integrate motion capture and crafted animation into both of these packages, allowing characters to respond better. So while the animater might say how you might animate particular moves, the packages allow the animation to be better responsive to the game environment, better responsive to the things at hand. There is a moment where the animation goes away, and the character response needs to be handled by the inverse kinematics code, and they work in concert.”
iTWire: Do you feel your career is coming full circle, with movie studios approaching Autodesk to provide game technology processes into feature films?
M-BH: “Yeah, we are seeing games technology begin to be used in feature films, but also architecture, manufacturing, design, all sorts of things. That is one of the more exciting areas in games right now, not saying that I am not proud of my Centipede high score, or that I don’t have my DS over there that I play games on regularly, but some of the really interesting places games technology is pushing the world around it, and getting into other industries is fascinating.”
iTWire: Which leads us into how you see the next five years in this industry panning out?
M-BH: “Right now you are seeing people that grew up on video games, become decision makers at companies.”
iTWire: What are they saying? Reload?
M-BH: “ [Laughs] No, no, we are seeing people who really played interactively and expect the world and their technologies to interact with them, finding that they are really able to make decisions and try new things out using game technologies, regardless of the field they are in. And that, to me is awesome.”
“We have seen the game industry change quite a bit over the past five years, in three key ways. One is the customer, the customer has expanded and broadened for games out there. To think my mum, who is a grand mum gets really excited about playing her DS all the way to my two nieces who have a Wii shows a really broad expansion of the industry and the type of games that are made.”
“We are also seeing the business of making games change quite a lot, huge amounts of consolidation and acquisition. We are seeing a field, depending on where you are in games, especially in casual games, were you are seeing lots of upstart companies, a very churning business environment.”
“Then you can see all the ways people are trying to make money from video games, whether it be via micro transactions, subscription based online games, advergaming, co-marketing and all the way back to ‘I am going to buy it in a box’, it’s really broadening.”
“And then another one is the technology, we were talking about this a little earlier. If you look at what is happening with the Xbox 360 and PS3, whole new multithreaded architectures are there. Online technology, World of Warcraft is a phenomenon that has occurred in the past five years.”
