There's quite a lot of haters out there since our game was unveiled, mainly 'cause the majority who have seen our first trailer don't really understand that this game isn't and does not intend to be like World Of Warcraft.
Heroes Of Telara does offer highly social and dynamic online gaming that is different than the usual mmorpg experience - not many understand what the hell that means or how the gameplay works, resulting in some pretty harsh first impression reviews. However, this reviewer seems to understand better than most of the press that showed up at our private demo - http://vgtribune.com/100-million-question-is-heroes-of-telara-the-world-of-warcraft-killer/ (this guy does exaggerate a bit - our goal is not to be a WoW killer, but rather to put out good game that is drastically different from your usual run-of-the-mill MMO game, which hopefully players will enjoy immensely).
This is the first trailer, so nothing is really polished as of yet.
Here's a scene from Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe that I worked on at Midway Games. Joker has some newfound abilities and decides to "call out" the Batman.
I did the facial animation for Joker and Batman. I also had to go in and heavily handkey Joker's motion, exaggerate his timing, poses and add a lot of flourishing movements to his hands and fingers (which were non-existent in the mocap data).
Variety magazine even gave props to Joker's performance. Click here for the article.
Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe is available now for the PS3, X360 and Wii. Do check it out. If anything, it is a fun game to play.
Here's a compilation of my most current animation work. I generally avoid including motion editing samples in my reel because I prefer to showcase my keyframing skills. However, I may edit it in if I were to apply at a studio that do motion capture work to demonstrate my experience with it.
Although I have worked with motion capture, I've never considered it to be animation - motion capture is a tool where you're given data to manipulate that was provided by another performer or actor, whereas in animation the animator IS the performer and actor.
Me personally, I find doing keyframe character animation provides the most rewarding experience and more often than not, much better results.
This the full version of the Gorilla animation I worked on at Charlex for a Verizon commercial spot. The character was set-up by an incredible rigger, Steve Mann. The animation is about 3 seconds long, but only small segments of it were used in the actual spot.
This is the first cinematic I worked on (at EA Chicago) involving motion capture editing - A promo video for Def Jam: ICON. The first draft of was started by another animator and when he was pulled away, I took over all animation resposibilities, often with little or no direction... because there was no animation director until halfway in production.
I had to heavily keyframe this mocap data because the actors' performances were awful and "floaty" - ironic, since mocap is supposed to capture the "realism" of motion. Somewhere in the middle of this production, it was decided that these characters will talk and have facial expressions... so a rudimentary facial rig with 25 bones was created. We did what we could given the extreme limitations.
