Gamasutra shared a nice recording of the GDC 2015 talk by Damon Shelton from Naughty Dog.
Gamasutra shared a wonderful recording of Damon Shelton talking about the Uncharted series and the creation of animation in The Last Of Us. Naughty Dog has a very interesting story with the adoption of motion cap technologies. Initially (back in the Uncharted 1 days) animators thought this solution will get them all fired, but later it became an essential part of the company’s workflow.
So during GDC 2015, Damon actually talked about the way the studio uses mocap and how the whole pipeline was designed. He talked a little about the tools Naughty Dog used to create high-quality motion capture data. It’s a nice technical talk, which shows how much stuff has to be done to create a good looking duo of characters.
Damon Shelton worked on a bunch of different projects in games and film. He’s currently working as a Technical Animation Craft Director at DICE. His main field is not surprisingly scanning, rigging and animation.
If you’re interested in character animation in The Last of Us, check out this video from Autodesk and Judd Simantov. In his presentation he showed some techniques he used in modeling and rigging of the main characters. He also covered the special ways to maximize realism and evoke an emotional response from players. Great stuff.
Check the full version of the talk at GDC Vault.