Autodesk Details Holiday Releases Using Its Animation Solutions

3D animation, modeling and rendering software developer Autodesk has announced that its game development software solutions were used to create a variety of titles hitting the shelves this holiday season. Holiday games created with Autodesk products include Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, BioWare’s Mass Effect, Flagship’s Hellgate: London, Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Insomniac Games’ Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s Heavenly Sword and Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Autodesk highlighted how its 3ds Max modeling, animation and rendering software, along with its MotionBuilder character animation software, was used to construct the character navigation for Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed. Additionally, Autodesk HumanIK middleware was integrated into the game engine, providing a kinematics system for characters. In another example, Infinity Ward used Autodesk Maya modeling, animation and rendering software for the modeling and texturing of all props, vehicles and characters in the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Lead character artist Joel Emslie explained, “Call of Duty 4 required that we re-imagine the Call of Duty franchise. The art team drew on their experience with Maya from the previous Call of Duty games and built a realistic modern world from the ground up. We made full use of the Maya software’s strengths, from polygonal modeling to our very first attempt at motion capture animation. The Maya Surface Sampler also proved to be the best solution for projecting robust normal maps onto our geometry. Nothing else compared to its flexibility in this area.”