ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.02 - MAY 2000

Oddworld Inhabitants: Weird Name, Great Game
(continued from page 2)

With story a priority, Abe’s Oddysee is odd-standing! © Oddworld.

Oddworld retains its story continuity thanks to Chris "the Storyman" Ulm, who works closely with Lorne Lanning on the continuing development of the characters and game play story. Farzad Varahramyan, leader of the production design department, then takes the story elements and conceptualizes them on paper, figuring out how they look, the structure underneath, and a little bit of how they move. At Oddworld, up until this developmental point, the process is all on paper. A computer hasn’t even been touched.

From there, every animator has his own way of developing a scene. But before approaching the animation task, the animators need to have thumbnail sketches and have figured out how they are going to approach the scene. From sitting and thinking about it to acting it out in front of the mirror, the animator needs to be able to get inside the character as much as an actor preparing for a screen role.

Character development doesn’t end when the game play begins. © Oddworld.

"In a way an animator is an actor, but it is more contrived because you have to continually react to the same scene over a period of its development," says Jones. "Walt Disney is quoted as saying, ‘The mind is the pilot.’ This means that the emotions have to be made available through the mechanics. For instance, if a character is feeling proud, I would move his center of gravity into his chest, where if he is feeling sad I would move it down to his lower legs so that his whole body slumps over as he walks."

Munch's Oddysee promises to be as popular as Abe's Oddysee or Exodus, with additional anticipation due to the new PlayStation 2 platform. Though Abe was introduced in 2D, the goal was always to evolve the characters into a 3D world as the technology was made available.

Oddworld has brought the action into a 3D landscape in Munch’s Oddysee. © Oddworld.

"The creativity and the conceptual qualities of Munch's Oddysee are completely in sync with the universe we've developed thus far," said Lorne Lanning, creator. "In the final analysis, we believe that existing fans will be much happier about the oddness of Oddworld in 3D than they ever could have been in 2D."

The Tools
For the development of Abe's Oddworld and Exodus, animators Scott Easley and Angie Jones used Maya software. For the real-time games found in Munch's Oddysee, the group is using 3D Studio Max, first creating all master animations in Maya, then porting them to 3D Studio Max because it talks directly to the Oddworld game engine.

The group continues to use a database of characters that they began creating is Alias five years ago. "This database has led to vast bestiary of characters and objects that we have used as models from day one," says Easley. "We always try to create new characters with extended shelf lives that will be in the company for years to come."
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