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Bungie Invades GDC

Sure, Claude already made a post about the 2014 Game Developers Conference today, but it looks like one more presentation snuck onto the schedule:

Face Animation Retargeting in Destiny

Jason Garris Jones | Character Technical Artist, Bungie
Tom Sanocki | Character Technical Lead, Bungie

In Face Animation Retargeting in Destiny, we'll explain how we were able to achieve high-quality face animation in our real-time cinematics.

• We'll show how 42 player-selectable heads shared one animation across different alien/robot races and genders.
• We'll explain how the way we parameterized our data allowed us to future-proof our rigs, giving our animators and performance-capture technology more flexibility to grow in the future.
• We'll explain the philosophy that influenced our topology design and bone layout.
• We'll cover the tools and rig controls we built for our animators.
• We'll cover some early approaches we tried and why they didn't work for us.
• Lastly, we'll demonstrate art techniques and processes adapted from computer animated film that were instrumental for achieving higher-quality face rigging.

Very cool. (If that last bullet point sounds intriguing, remember that Tom Sanocki spent 11 years working for Pixar!) GDC also updated each session listing with the proper date and time, so if you're lucky enough to attend the conference be sure to check out all four of Bungie's panels:

• Face Animation Retargeting in Destiny: Wednesday, March 19 (2:00pm-3:00pm)
• Designing the Bungie Animation Workflow: Thursday, March 20 (5:30pm-6:30pm)
• Building Customizable Characters for Bungie's Destiny: Friday, March 21 (10:00am-11:00am)
• Upgrading Bungie's Production Practices for a Brave New World: Friday, March 21 (11:30am-12:30pm)

This is pretty exciting when you consider the plethora of Destiny teases we got from last year's presentation! (By the way, if you need extra help remembering the dates posted above, the new DBO Calendar might prove useful.)

Stepping Up Their Game(making)

The number of Bungie-given talks at this year's GDC continues to rise - it was announced today that Executive Producer Mark Noseworthy will be talking about Upgrading Bungie's Production Practices for a Brave New World as part of the Production talks track. He'll look at how Bungie dealt with rapid expansion and the tools that came out of it. Sounds pretty interesting! This showed up on both Gamasutra and Polygon today.

Destiny Drawing Board: Shrike

SigbiasSilva let us know about the latest Destiny Drawing Board entry - this one focuses on the vehicle known as the Shrike. Beautiful! (You can, of course, find a local copy of this entry - and in fact ALL entries - in our Destiny Drawing Board Archive. For, you know... posterity.)

Yeah, the box is better than the contents.

So if your mom was an artist at Bungie, would you have the coolest stuff on the planet? Well, duh. Lorraine McLees painted up a couple of gift boxes for her boys - Recon Number 54 did a fantastic job documenting the process for the box that has Halo art on it, but the second box has a gorgeous Destiny Hunter, and has had minimal exposure. These two composite pics were posted on Lorraine's Facebook feed, but they were only visible to friends, so we're making them more widely accessible (with her permission, of course). Check 'em out - click for larger (and more complete) versions!

Scaling back the hype

The Motley Fool thinks Bobby Kotick's recent claim that Destiny will "become the best-selling new video game IP in history" might be a bit overblown. Go read their analysis of the situation!

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