As a software engineer in Electronic Arts’ worldwide motion capture studio, the systems I write and maintain touch many of our games in small ways. It’s not often that I can point to a feature in a game and say “I did that.”
Battlefield 3 is different. We built the facial animation pipeline used for the interrogation scenes and I’m rather proud of what we accomplished. EA Capture was small studio with an aggressive timeline to create a new technology for one of our company’s biggest titles. And we had to do this while maintaining the same workload and quality for our other game teams. It was an incredible experience and if I had to do it again… I would do many things differently. Though, that shows how hard we were pushing our limits and how much better this technology will become. It’s next generation technology used for the current generation of games.
I’m finally at the point where I can watch the cutscenes and see how good they look, instead of seeing the things I want to change. More than anything, I’m excited about what our creative talent will do with this in the future.
As much as I want to celebrate the achievement of my team, I am in awe of the wizards at DICE who actually got this stuff working in Frostbite. You can see the fruits of their labour below.
If you can’t view it on YouTube, check it out on GameTrailers.
Tags: animation, Battlefield, motion capture
