Randall Glass - Animator / 3D artist
Skills: Maya animation (keyframe, mocap polish)
hobbyist: Maya modeling, Zbrush, Substance Painter
hobbyist: Maya modeling, Zbrush, Substance Painter
Animation Reel/Portfolio
Callisto Protocol 2022
Callisto protocol animation shot list
Cinematics Animation Reel for Callisto Protocol by Randall Glass www.nailbiter.net
Callisto Protocol (2022) created by Striking Distance Studios. www.sds.com
Hey there,
I was fortunate to land a contract gig as a Cinematics animator for PlayStation Studios - Visual Arts from 2021-2022. I helped polish up body and facial performance capture shots for the Callisto Protocol (a PS4/5, Xbox, PC game). The final game shots were rendered in real time in Unreal Engine 4. I've spliced in some playblasts from Maya (the authoring tool I used on this project).
Workflow:
I was given a scene with the shot already assembled, sequenced with body mocap, some preliminary hand poses, and mostly final camera motion. My contribution consisted of adding more detailed hand animation, body tweaks, and making sure characters were contacting things (props, environment, other characters) in a solid fashion, while staying faithful to the performances created by the actors. I also worked on some facial animation (based on an actor's recorded headcam footage), which involved manipulating a character face model to help drive Sony's proprietary solving software.
Here are a few of the more noteworthy scenes I worked on:
00:00 The Box. Hand animation. Some camera tweaks. I also keyframe animated the scary guy's face at the end.
00:18 Dani & Jacob reunion. More Hand animation. The challenge here is to keep the hands alive. You will notice a little spark at the beginning of this shot. That was the Player jimmying open the door (gameplay animation). I blended from that into the cinematic.
Also Dani had a different stance/position when the big door opens, so making that look convincing (with no suitable mocap) was a challenge.
At the end as Jacob walks through the door, he blends back into the gameplay idle pose.
Facial animation was done by a different animator, as we generally split up the work, one animator focusing on body, another on face.
01:05 Suiting Up. I worked on Elias' facial animation in this scene (as shown by the little playblast in the bottom corner). This animation is based on an actor's actual performance, captured by a face camera. My job was to use Playstation's proprietary tools to translate/transfer this performance onto the character model. This involved me creating lots of face poses (using a FACS based rig). As is common in gamedev, the work goes through a few hands by the time it gets into the engine. You really won't know how something looks until it's all plugged in together (body + face). Eye lines may not be correct, or a facial expression may not read, so things will get tweaked. My playblast in the corner represents what I had turned in (in comparison to the actual in-game scene).
Also, I did not learn this until later, but the actor playing Elias (Zeke Alton) is American! Holy smokes (bloody 'ell?), I could have sworn he was a Brit. I thought he did some great acting here.
02:02 Weapon Printer, Jacob and Elias plan escape (excerpt). Body animation polish with some minor facial tweaks. I inherited this scene from another animator. I had to just tidy it up a bit. A new pistol model was brought in, so I had to make Jacob fiddle with it convincingly. Other tweaks (not shown) in the scene were more contact type stuff (Jacob winces in pain and massages back of his neck). Fixing of eyelines. Again, we had to blend into and out of gameplay for a lot of these cinematic scenes.
02:15 Jacob unplugs Dani (excerpt). Body animation only. More contact and hand animation. A fight ensues and they both tumble (not shown).
02:28 Jacob and Dani escape pod (excerpt). Body animation only. More contact and hand animation. I don't know about you, but keeping a hand alive while pressed against a window is challenging. All those fingers. To help out, I created a quick little IK rig for the fingers to make placing them on the window easier to manage. Dani's elbow moving back and forth was actually her original mocap (actress had her hand resting on a softball sized prop suspended by a stand), so I used that to help drive the hand pivoting on the glass. To be honest, I could have spent another week or two making it look better. Another fun challenge was getting her to grab that harness and jerk it around.
I never noticed this until putting this reel together that Jacob repeats Elias' line "I can't keep running from what I've done." Nice bookends, writers!
I learn something on each job I take, and this one was an education.
Congrats to Striking Distance Studios (and the Playstation Studios cinematics team) for putting out this game. As far as I know it was pretty much made with everyone working remotely, during a pandemic. Crazy huh?
Thanks for watching!
Randall Glass
www.nailbiter.net
Callisto Protocol (2022) created by Striking Distance Studios. www.sds.com
Hey there,
I was fortunate to land a contract gig as a Cinematics animator for PlayStation Studios - Visual Arts from 2021-2022. I helped polish up body and facial performance capture shots for the Callisto Protocol (a PS4/5, Xbox, PC game). The final game shots were rendered in real time in Unreal Engine 4. I've spliced in some playblasts from Maya (the authoring tool I used on this project).
Workflow:
I was given a scene with the shot already assembled, sequenced with body mocap, some preliminary hand poses, and mostly final camera motion. My contribution consisted of adding more detailed hand animation, body tweaks, and making sure characters were contacting things (props, environment, other characters) in a solid fashion, while staying faithful to the performances created by the actors. I also worked on some facial animation (based on an actor's recorded headcam footage), which involved manipulating a character face model to help drive Sony's proprietary solving software.
Here are a few of the more noteworthy scenes I worked on:
00:00 The Box. Hand animation. Some camera tweaks. I also keyframe animated the scary guy's face at the end.
00:18 Dani & Jacob reunion. More Hand animation. The challenge here is to keep the hands alive. You will notice a little spark at the beginning of this shot. That was the Player jimmying open the door (gameplay animation). I blended from that into the cinematic.
Also Dani had a different stance/position when the big door opens, so making that look convincing (with no suitable mocap) was a challenge.
At the end as Jacob walks through the door, he blends back into the gameplay idle pose.
Facial animation was done by a different animator, as we generally split up the work, one animator focusing on body, another on face.
01:05 Suiting Up. I worked on Elias' facial animation in this scene (as shown by the little playblast in the bottom corner). This animation is based on an actor's actual performance, captured by a face camera. My job was to use Playstation's proprietary tools to translate/transfer this performance onto the character model. This involved me creating lots of face poses (using a FACS based rig). As is common in gamedev, the work goes through a few hands by the time it gets into the engine. You really won't know how something looks until it's all plugged in together (body + face). Eye lines may not be correct, or a facial expression may not read, so things will get tweaked. My playblast in the corner represents what I had turned in (in comparison to the actual in-game scene).
Also, I did not learn this until later, but the actor playing Elias (Zeke Alton) is American! Holy smokes (bloody 'ell?), I could have sworn he was a Brit. I thought he did some great acting here.
02:02 Weapon Printer, Jacob and Elias plan escape (excerpt). Body animation polish with some minor facial tweaks. I inherited this scene from another animator. I had to just tidy it up a bit. A new pistol model was brought in, so I had to make Jacob fiddle with it convincingly. Other tweaks (not shown) in the scene were more contact type stuff (Jacob winces in pain and massages back of his neck). Fixing of eyelines. Again, we had to blend into and out of gameplay for a lot of these cinematic scenes.
02:15 Jacob unplugs Dani (excerpt). Body animation only. More contact and hand animation. A fight ensues and they both tumble (not shown).
02:28 Jacob and Dani escape pod (excerpt). Body animation only. More contact and hand animation. I don't know about you, but keeping a hand alive while pressed against a window is challenging. All those fingers. To help out, I created a quick little IK rig for the fingers to make placing them on the window easier to manage. Dani's elbow moving back and forth was actually her original mocap (actress had her hand resting on a softball sized prop suspended by a stand), so I used that to help drive the hand pivoting on the glass. To be honest, I could have spent another week or two making it look better. Another fun challenge was getting her to grab that harness and jerk it around.
I never noticed this until putting this reel together that Jacob repeats Elias' line "I can't keep running from what I've done." Nice bookends, writers!
I learn something on each job I take, and this one was an education.
Congrats to Striking Distance Studios (and the Playstation Studios cinematics team) for putting out this game. As far as I know it was pretty much made with everyone working remotely, during a pandemic. Crazy huh?
Thanks for watching!
Randall Glass
www.nailbiter.net
Animation Shot list / description
Randall Glass animation reel. website: http://www.nailbiter.net
Shot Breakdown (all keyframed unless noted otherwise):
(00:02)
1. Cinematic Vignette from Amazon's Crucible game. "Rahi & Brother". I animated the little floating robot named "Brother" (keyframed). Total short was 1min, 15 seconds.
(00:23)
From Amazon's Crucible game. A series of Stomper AI animations I keyframed. I animated a whole set of these including various idles/ambient life behaviors, other death anims, etc.
Stomper Gallop (keyframe)
Stomper Walk (keyframe)
Stomper death A (keyframe)
Stomper death B (keyframe)
Mocap polish shots from Amazon's Crucible game. These are a bunch of emotes. Was given mocap footage (as seen on the right side) and had to make the shot fit within 6 seconds.
(00:40)
Tosca helicopter gun emote
Tosca butt wiggle emote
(00:52)
Ajonah emote kata staff (mocap polish) - I used nCloth sims on the hat and ears using custom proxy geo, then baked back down to controllers. If there's a controller on a joint, I will make an attempt to put some animation on it. Couldn't count on the engine to simulate it properly right away, so I did it in Maya and baked it down.
(01:03)
Sazan emote violin. I like the little vibrato of the fingers on the neck. Had to add my own controller (locators with aim offset) to the rig to get it to move the way I wanted. I tend to add things like geo or other controls to help make a motion more realistic (and easier / precise).
(01:08)
Rahi crouch idle breaker (mocap polish) - Brother (little robot) was keyframed. Was given no direction on this other than "Rahi pushes Brother away". The mocap looked horrendous, so I tweaked it. Did a bunch of these crouch idle breakers (5 or 6). They were as complicated as a full blown emote and never got plugged into the game. That's life.
(01:14)
Ajonah emote tube dancer (mocap polish). This was a looping animation. I trimmed it here. I like the overlap I put in her limbs. Hat flaps and ears sim'd with nCloth again & baked down.
(01:18)
Ajonah emote bubble gun (mocap polish). I keyframed balloons for vfx reference. Fun little emote. I was given this assignment after they had completed the facial rig, so I added some animation there. "Pop!"
(01:23)
Ogre log climb - this was from an Animation Mentor assignment. I still kinda like it.
(01:26)
Source Filmmaker (SFM) short I made back in 2012 called "Scout vs. Witch" (vimeo.com/48605505). For the Witch I Z-brush sculpted some phonemes/visemes for her so she could say her lines. Yes, I'm Intimately familiar with .qc files, studiomdl.exe and the like. The entire process was an exercise in pain. I have never recovered.
Hey that's it.
Randall Glass
http://nailbiter.net
Shot Breakdown (all keyframed unless noted otherwise):
(00:02)
1. Cinematic Vignette from Amazon's Crucible game. "Rahi & Brother". I animated the little floating robot named "Brother" (keyframed). Total short was 1min, 15 seconds.
(00:23)
From Amazon's Crucible game. A series of Stomper AI animations I keyframed. I animated a whole set of these including various idles/ambient life behaviors, other death anims, etc.
Stomper Gallop (keyframe)
Stomper Walk (keyframe)
Stomper death A (keyframe)
Stomper death B (keyframe)
Mocap polish shots from Amazon's Crucible game. These are a bunch of emotes. Was given mocap footage (as seen on the right side) and had to make the shot fit within 6 seconds.
(00:40)
Tosca helicopter gun emote
Tosca butt wiggle emote
(00:52)
Ajonah emote kata staff (mocap polish) - I used nCloth sims on the hat and ears using custom proxy geo, then baked back down to controllers. If there's a controller on a joint, I will make an attempt to put some animation on it. Couldn't count on the engine to simulate it properly right away, so I did it in Maya and baked it down.
(01:03)
Sazan emote violin. I like the little vibrato of the fingers on the neck. Had to add my own controller (locators with aim offset) to the rig to get it to move the way I wanted. I tend to add things like geo or other controls to help make a motion more realistic (and easier / precise).
(01:08)
Rahi crouch idle breaker (mocap polish) - Brother (little robot) was keyframed. Was given no direction on this other than "Rahi pushes Brother away". The mocap looked horrendous, so I tweaked it. Did a bunch of these crouch idle breakers (5 or 6). They were as complicated as a full blown emote and never got plugged into the game. That's life.
(01:14)
Ajonah emote tube dancer (mocap polish). This was a looping animation. I trimmed it here. I like the overlap I put in her limbs. Hat flaps and ears sim'd with nCloth again & baked down.
(01:18)
Ajonah emote bubble gun (mocap polish). I keyframed balloons for vfx reference. Fun little emote. I was given this assignment after they had completed the facial rig, so I added some animation there. "Pop!"
(01:23)
Ogre log climb - this was from an Animation Mentor assignment. I still kinda like it.
(01:26)
Source Filmmaker (SFM) short I made back in 2012 called "Scout vs. Witch" (vimeo.com/48605505). For the Witch I Z-brush sculpted some phonemes/visemes for her so she could say her lines. Yes, I'm Intimately familiar with .qc files, studiomdl.exe and the like. The entire process was an exercise in pain. I have never recovered.
Hey that's it.
Randall Glass
http://nailbiter.net
For Amazon's Crucible I also worked on a bunch of Marketing materials, which included character poses and storyboards/animatics for Cinematics (which never saw the light of day).
