Ubisoft Annecy and Montreal are part of the Ubisoft Group, a video game development and publishing studio. Annecy's studio is known for working with Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Shanghai studios on the multiplayer Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed franchises. The Montreal studio is known for being the leader of Ubisoft studios in the development of licenses such as Assassin's Creed or Watchdogs. In 2014, following the success of Watchdogs, Montreal and Annecy collaborated in the animation work of the DLC Bad Blood cinematics.
In this project, I was in charge of motion editing the characters of this cinematic that is played at the end of the DLC Bad Blood, as well as tracking and facial animation.
Strengthen the implementation of actors in the setting
The MoCap is a great tool to quickly have realistic animations of very high quality. The negative is that the scenery that will surround the actors is ultra limited. Fortunately, we are surrounded by real performers, who use an overflowing imagination to immerse themselves in the context of a scene.
To further increase performance, motion editing will bring small extra details that will really link the performance to its context. Simply also because changes of staging are applied after the shooting, and it is necessary to rework the animation to keep the plan consistent.
Keyframing to increase performance
An example of this cinematic is the moment when the screens all light up simultaneously, and blind the character. T-Bone turns his head and closes his eyes to protect his eyesight. On the set, there were not all these screens, so we had to rework the performance to add this reaction at the level of the body but also at the level of facial animation.
Similarly, like any motion editing work, contacts on the ground and with props were worked on.
The movement of T-Bone's character has been modified by teleporting it from one place to another at the very beginning of the cinematic, so that the character's framing with the screens is more relevant.
Motion editing really adds a higher quality of mocap data. Beyond the simple work of contacts and cleaning vibrations or jumps. Above all, when there is a change of direction and direction after filming, it avoids starting all over again. We avoid new catches on the Mocap plateau, which require a lot of organization to set up especially when the plateau is at the other end of the country, or even abroad. A keyframe pass to add a reaction, or change a move and the trick is played.
