Rigging a Resident Evil - Inside the Bone Code of Operation Raccoon City
Ben Hanke (Slant Six Games)
This session will demonstrate how Slant Six Games implemented runtime support for helper bones driven by Maya expressions in 'Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City'. It will describe the authoring workflow, pipeline and runtime implementation in detail, and demonstrate the practical application of expression-driven helper bones in our game.It will show how we drive a range of detailed rendering rigs from a single animation skeleton, allowing us to completely decouple the production of art and animation for player characters. It will describe how this brought benefits ranging from higher fidelity skinning to significant savings in time and memory.
It is expected that attendees should get enough detailed information from this presentation to be able to evaluate the potential gains of employing this technique in their own engine, and gain a significant head start in implementing a similar system themselves should they wish to do so.
This talk is aimed primarily at an audience of intermediate to senior level engineers with 4+ years experience. Attendees will benefit most from this session if they already have a good understanding of basic skeletal animation and have an interest in the low-level implementation details of the end-to-end system described.