We caught up recently with Tony Zeffiro, a 13 year game industry veteran and a Lead Animator at NetherRealm Studios in Chicago. NetherRealms is (formily MidwayGames) is responsible for Mortal Kombat  and most recently the release of Injustice: Gods among us.

What made you get into the game industry and choose animation?

My first animation job didn’t work out, and I kind of fell into the video game industry by chance.  I knew I loved bringing something to life, and in school I began to learn all about computer animation, which made me want to focus on the growth that it was going through with feature films and game cinematics.

At the time, Midway was looking to hire and I had 2 years of animation work experience, so they hired me to work on MLB Slugfest.  I learned all about motion capture, which was some deviation from traditional hand key, but soon I realized that all the layering on top of motion capture and using motion as just a base of movement, can be such a powerful and creative technology.  Games especially need animations to be output at a rapid pace so having that base motion is a huge help.

How important is a traditional art background in your position?

It is important to go to school for at least a couple of years and learn more about the technology and focus solely on what you are interested in.  It can take anyone a couple years just to figure out what you want to do, but when that happens, learning from some of the best instructors who have had experience in your field of study is priceless.  Animation in particular focuses on motion, and knowing the body, how it’s built, how it moves, is something you learn about all the way back to Life Drawing classes.  You also need to be able to express ideas through drawing, and all the basic art classes help further your skills.

How challenging is it creating the fight animations found in Mortal Kombat and Injustice?

It can be challenging to re-invent the fighting styles of characters for each game, but we bring in martial artists and we have a very talented design team to help make each character feel unique.  The best part about working on Mortal Kombat is the over the top fatalities we create.  The ideas for those come from various people in the studio and it’s our job to bring those to life.  This is where traditional hand key ability comes into play more, as many of the movements are so crazy that obviously we can’t motion capture everything.  Injustice is similar with the Supermoves that each character has.  With the addition of flying characters, making them feel like they are actually floating, dynamic, and still look realistic, is challenging and so much fun at the same time.

Who was your favorite character to animate in the MK games? Who was the least?

It’s hard to pick just one character who is my favorite, with all the history of Mortal Kombat, but I’d have to say the most fun to animate is Goro because of his 4 arms.  No one really knows how someone with 4 arms would move, attack, and react, so we have a lot of creative input to bringing him to life.  A close second is Scorpion because of his combination of martial arts and special abilities.  My least is probably someone who is more of just a guy off the street who’s a good fighter, like a Stryker, but honestly, every character has something unique about them that make animating them such a blast.

When you are not creating art, what do you do to fill your time, or relax?

When I’m not creating art I try to spend as much time as I can with my wife, my family, and my lab.  I try to stay healthy by working out because the hours can get very intense, and it helps me stay focused and alert.

 If you were not working in games what do you think you would like to do?

If I wasn’t working in games I’d probably be a chef.  I say that not being able to cook for the life of me, but I’ve always thought it was such a creative field.  I have to admit that I am a little addicted to some of those cooking shows, but I’ll leave the actual cooking to my beautiful wife, for now.

What advice can you give people looking to do what you do?

My advice would be to go to school to find your true passion.  You need to be able to learn from people who have experience in your field, and eventually create a demo reel to be able to show employers what you’ve learned and your potential.  Constantly study your surroundings, how everything moves, and take video reference to try an mimic in your animations.  The last thing is always be humble and willing to learn.  Criticism is a huge part of any art field and you have to be willing to take that criticism and grow.

Lastly, in the spirit of the newly released Injustice game, if you could have one superhero power, what would it be and why?

Another tough question, I mean, who wouldn’t want Xray vision?  Seriously though, super strength would be nice, but I personally would love to be able to fly.  Dating back to a little kid watching Superman, that’s what always stood out.  If I can’t punch someone up into space with my strength, than at least I can travel the world  and be back in time to create the next big thing.

Thanks to Tony for taking the time for the interview!

Images are screen shots of the games Injustice and MortalKombat available on their respective websites from NetherRealm Studios in Chicago

100 Total Textures Ready For Use In Your Game!

I’m excited to announce we have partnered with GameTextures.com to provide top-notch, ready-to-use texture packs through our CG Cookie Shop. Each of these texture packs comes with a large number of tiled textures, complete with their diffuse, normal, specular, glossy, and height maps. All of the textures are expertly crafted, with a great attention to detail. Check them out on the shop for more details and a complete listing of all the included textures.

Asylum Texture Pack

Originally designed as their first actual theme pack, this texture package has some incredible textures which will allow you to construct an old, gross asylum in no time flat. Check out the Padded Wall Textures, the heavy set steel locked doors, and all of the rest of the decorations to match.

Sci-Fi Texture Pack

The GT Art Team built this package slowly over the last year, and includes all of the gems in our sci-fi material library. You’ll find walls, floors, blast doors, crates, laser blast marks, ship damage, and much much more inside. Having this arsenal of tools in your pocket will allow you to create any sort of space station, mars research station, or abandoned asteroid mining ship with ease and speed.

Medieval Texture Pack

Inside, you’ll find beautiful brick walls, shiny used castle (and commoner!) doors and windows, ground textures and more! This pack was created over the course of the last year, and has quite a few of our favorite materials which are sure to make your dungeon, castle, village, or throne room stand out.

Be sure to check out GameTextures.com for even more textures.

Free 360-degree HDR Panoramas available for download

A big thanks out to the recent contribution donation from http://www.hdri-hub.com. It has been quite a while since we’ve completed a contribution post and this is a good one.

Below are 4 panoramas available under the free Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. 

Provided by: HDRI-HUB.com

HDRI-Hub.com provides royalty free, high resolution 360-degree High Dynamic Range panoramas and high quality architectural textures.

More Resources

Do you have a great resource you would like to share? Send it over to CG Cookie at support@cgcookie.com and we’ll consider sharing it on the site!

I’m proud to announce that our Eat Sheep game is now available for free on the iOS iPad app store!

Eat Sheep is a top down, puzzle game for iOS mobile devices. Your goal in the game is to navigate the level, eating the incoming sheep before they can reach the barn by controlling your monster. The game has been built completely by CG Cookie.

This iOS game was built almost exclusively with volunteer time over the last year. We used Blender and Unity 3D for all the 3D assets and the game engine.  If you wish to support us please consider purchasing Wool or Monsters in game! This will give you the ability to upgrade your monsters further, unlock more monsters, and help enable us to produce another game in the near future! This game would not have been possible without all the support you already give CG Cookie. I hope you’ll also consider giving us an honest review of the app from the App Store page

With enough support we can do another one

You can find out more on the game, read about the team, download free assets, and more on http://eatsheep.com

Download Eat Sheep Free for iPad Now!

Game Highlights:

• Free to play
• 60 hand designed playable levels across 3 worlds.
• Play as Melvin or one of the other three lovable monsters.
• Upgrade your Monsters speed and abilities.
• Collect the 3 world trophies
• Collect Wool as in-game currency to be used for unlocking new monsters, upgrading their abilities and buying cookies to keep them energized.

Coming soon to iPhone, iPod, and Android devices!

We are releasing the first version for iPads and will soon be releasing a version that is optimized for the smaller screens of iPhones and iPods. We are also actively working on Android version!

Support Us by Downloading Eat Sheep for iPad Now!

When CG Cookie was started in 2008 by Wes Burke, it was a small and humble place. A place to come and learn a trick or two from guest authors. It was great.

I think it’s safe to say that CG Cookie has come a long ways since 2008. A very long ways.

In 2013 we have over 32,000 registered users on the network, and the Citizen community has grown to over 6,500. This is thousands of people coming to CG Cookie every day to learn and apply new techniques and skills to a myriad of trades. The community is made up of architects, engineers, game developers, hobbyists, VFX artists. It is made up of people with passions for learning.

Passion is at the core of everything we do. With your help we’re able to continue driving that passion. CG Cookie still feels small and humble but it’s experience has evolved. It’s value has grown.

Today we are unveiling the next stage in our passion. CG Cookie 4.0.

A New Experience

Starting in October of last year we began imagining ways we could improve the site experience for you. To bring the design up to the level of our training. We wanted the design to complement and accelerate the training, not merely display it.

CG Cookie’s 4.0 design has evolved over the last nine months. Every facet of the design has been worked on, improving the layout, the navigation, the presentation, and the interaction.

Our development and design team have outdone themselves. A big shout out to Kyle Unzicker and Pippin Williamson is in order. I am so proud of their work and excited to let you experience it today.

Home Redefined

All previous versions of CG Cookie have treated the homepage of each site as a blog of sorts. Showing you the latest in our training and resources but not necessarily the greatest.

As our library has grown much of our material has been lost, moving beyond the front page.

The new homepage displays both the latest and the greatest content, allowing us to hand-pick the most inspiring training and present it right on the front page. Not only this, but it brings a greater emphasis to the incredible work of our community, showing the latest staff favorites from the gallery right alongside our training.

Courses and Lessons

With the growth of our Citizen community, it became clear we needed a better way to present our courses to you. In 4.0, complete series are broken down into courses and lessons, providing a more guided platform. This enables better organization and more relevant content with each lesson.

With this lesson breakdown, interaction with the instructor is also greatly improved, enabling you to get help with a specific portion of the training. No longer do you need to sift through pages of comments to find the ones related to the current video.

Stunning Profiles

One of our goals with CG Cookie is to provide a means for you to reach your own goals. To enable you to pursue your education, hobby, career path. A key part of these goals comes with displaying your work to the world.

Checkout James’ profile here!

The vastly improved profile pages in 4.0 give you a place to showcase your work and let others connect with you. Our hope is these profiles can enable you to reach out, share your work with the world, and maybe take the next step.

Advanced Search

With our library continuing to grow. Finding the most relevant training, not only the newest, has been a challenge for our users in the past. With 4.0 we are bringing a much improved and powerful search option.

You can now search for courses, lessons, posts, resources, and images. In addition, you can filter these results by category and keywords.

Citizen

In order to continue the pursuit of this passion it has come time to change our Citizen rates. These changes enable us to continue innovating and bring more training and resources to you, by way of new authors and services.

The new rates are:

The rate change will take affect on Monday, June 24th. Note, current recurring subscribers will never see an increase of their rates so long as the subscription does not lapse.

The above items just barely touch on the improvements to CG Cookie 4.0. Take some time to look around and check it all out. Nearly every part of the site has been updated, improved, or both.

I am so thrilled with 4.0 and I think you’re going to love it. This is only the first of many phases in the evolution of CG Cookie. Today is an exciting day but it is only the beginning.

Sincerely

Jonathan

P.S. If you find anything amiss on the site please report it via the Help Desk, found at the top right of the site. This way we can get it resolved quickly. Thanks!

Mobile Game Development Update

It has been almost a month since we announced our first internal mobile project called “Eat Sheep“. Though there is still a bit of work left on the game, I wanted to take this time to share some of the recent updates on production! So let me stop talking and get to the goods.

Monster Animations are in full swing!

Life is being created in this monsters by the talented Beorn Leonard. We had such a good time working with Beorn on his Animation Series, that we asked him to hang out with us a bit longer. Beorn is adding some of his skill set he picked up from working on Sintel and Happy Feet 2 into these hug-able little monsters. Check out the very “Work in progress” Animations below of the Melvin Monster and Sheep animations.

Art updates:

Creating assets for this game has been a bit of fun and a challenge. One thing we constantly have to keep reminding ourselves is the “players view”. Meaning model to the camera. You can see some of these assets could use a few more polys from the views we are presenting,  keep in mind the player is going to viewing them from an 85 degree downward angle. Most assets will render smaller then quarter on screen.

Engineering:

Teeth have been magnetized, sheep have been polarized and Melvin’s ready to eat! In addition to setting the little monster up with a new pair of chompers, the engineering team has worked on setting up some more intuitive behind-the-scenes controls and making database connections. They’ve also made sure that the monsters’ memories now last longer than a single session, and are beginning work on having monsters from all over the world share their wool income figures so they can do some number crunching. The developers also continued their seemingly never ending seach-and-destroy mission on bugs, diligently squashing them wherever they go.

Concept/Art

The art side has been focusing less on conception and more on user interface, menus, and buttons. Right now we are working toward playing a full run-through so on the art side I’m working on the main screen, level select screen, win/loss screen, and the actual in-game hud.
Here are the drafts so far of the main screen and level select screen below ↓

…But somehow another monster sneaked his way into the Eat Sheep World.

Meet Phillip.

He comes with a face full of cute and a full tutorial on creating him using Melvin’s base as a foundation. View the tutorial.

Newsletter

To stay up to date with the latest Eat Sheep updates Like us on the Eat Sheep Facebook page or subscribe to the Newsletter. Thank you again for the support!

In this tip tutorial we will look at how a “generic” ice and snow shader is composed and what it takes to achieve a realistic look. We will be using the preset scene that comes with the Modo 501 Content Pack which is designed and optimized for creating shaders.

In this tip tutorial we will learn how to create a basic carpaint shader using the preset scene that comes with the Modo 501 Content Pack which is designed and optimized for creating shaders.

In this exciting tutorial we will create a Christmas globe, we will use modo fur to add glittler to the globe and a mask that will mask out certain areas of the globe that do not have glitter on them. We will also take a look at a simple way to set objects on a cloth material and have the cloth follow the object lines. Merry Christmas!

This tutorial is aimed at beginner users of Modo. We will start off from a basic shape and slowly build up our model. Second phase covers a basic unwrapping of the elements that we need to be unwrapped and lastly we assign materials and textures to get our scene ready to render. Enjoy!