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Here's a selection of some of the sequences I was responsible for on RIGS: Mechanized Combat League for PlayStation VR .

• My main responsibility, when I joined Guerrilla was to find the best, most efficient way to build and maintain  the very heavy pits sequence of the game. The sequence consisted of a 1st person player character and two team mates that were interacting in front of you as you all get placed in your rig by a flying drone. Each class, of which there were four, had five acting variants per team mate (10 unique animations per rig class) and a female variant for all of those. Besides the human pilot characters, we had drones flying around, rigs powering up, elevators, trucks driving around and engineers going about their business.

• I was left to work out the choreography of the sequence, timing and finding workarounds for all the particular challenges that VR represents. True and tested cinematic style camera wisdom does not apply directly to VR as we quickly learned.
  For the team huddles I co-directed Motion Capture sessions along with the Lead animator and even donned the Mocap suit for several of them. The sequence got complex very fast as all the variations was added in, however I think the result was an exciting, busy environment that players won’t mind revisiting before every match.

• Besides the Pitt sequence I did all the set up and animation for the Tutorial sequence (minus the Chief character). The sequence starts in a big open space that needed to be populated with dozens of engineers, trucks, rigs and drones. The timing and choreography of this sequence was largely dependent on the Chief character who instructs the player. We then move into a section that teaches you how to move and fire at targets. I worked closely with the Game Designer to set up and animate the target drones in that sequence.

• The tunnel the Player walks through was largely left up to me to populate, with the Art director giving regular feedback.

• I also populated the Front End Garage sequence where I had to find a quick way to have as many characters as possible climb escalators and walk hallways without crippling the frame rate. For the chief character who instructs the player in how to interact with the game menus, I did Mocap clean up and retargeting in Motion Builder. I created male and female variants of everything. Some editing in Morpheme was also involved.

• I captured and directed Motion Capture for the post match airplane sequence as well as cleaning up and retargeting  a whole lot of the Podium celebrations you see when you’ve won a match and finished as the top of your team.

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The final month of the project was spent animating cameras showing Pilots celebrations intended for marketing purposes.

Lead animator on Rigs was Darren Hyland.
Lucy Webb taught me everything I know about Motion Builder.
Adam Turnbull, Danny Wong and James Bown drank a lot of tea as well as being a kick-ass animation team.