This is the trailer and cutscenes for the Codemasters game “Overlord”. I worked mainly as an animator on this project although there was a lot of work to be done on it so we got in another freelance animator to help out with a couple of the shots.
The biggest problem we had on this projects was the rendering. We’d just switched over to rendering in Renderman for Maya and we were having various issues with displacement maps and memory. It was an abitious project, I had to work out a way of animating lots of the “minion” characters charging across the landscape in a very short amount of time. The solution was to animate a number of looped run-cycles and then have them follow a spline path with various offsets applied to the loops to add randomness.
The other big problem we had was that the rigs kept doing odd things and I’d spend hours animating a scene then when I came to open it up again strange things would have happened to characters arms and legs, they’d pop and rotate and things would dissapear out of the scene completely. A lot of time went into chasing these bugs and glitches. Ah well. The final result was pretty nice so it all worked out ok in the end.
My favourite sequence is the charge, I spent a lot of time getting the characters and camera right on that, I wanted to have many more minions but technically we just didnt have the time so I wanted to have the cameras shake about like they were being held by a cameraman right in the middle if the action. The locked-off style camera works to add pace and give a real sense of action.
Heres an animatic of my main animation work on Overlord (see breakdown):
Some examples of how I setup the charging minions:
Heres a little character gag I did for the end shot, it was only a background piece but I like it so here it is:
Job Breakdown: Sequence design: Animation (suiting up sequence, charge sequence, end shot main characters), edit.
