Video Games ----- Resume ----- Email rogerberrones at hotmail

My contribution to Mortal Kombat Deception was focused on the intro cinematic. I worked closely with the Mortal Kombat animators as well as the Creative Director so that the animations maintained a high quality and consistency.

Responsibilities and Accomplishments

• Lead and mentor animators; schedule, assign, and critique animations
• Review story boards and create shot lists for motion capture shoots
• Meet regularly with Cinema Director and Mortal Kombat team leads for reviews and final approval of scenes
• Create animation pipeline and file names including directory structure
• Direct motion capture shoots and create props to allow easier capture of motions
• Create motion setup files for each character after each motion capture session
• Apply motion capture data to character models and help finalize FBX animations
• Invent custom MotionBuilder rigs for non-human limbs that required animating
• Help render and composite a few of the scenes

Here is the finished intro cinematic to the game.

This is a short movie to show a custom rig I built for this character. I built the rig to allow for more believable movement in the wings and tail. I also tweaked the rig to account for the non-human legs. Alias sponsored my presentation of this rig, and the movies that follow, at the 2005 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

One of my responsibilities was to meet with the director to go over each of the shots in the movie. After the review and approval of the animatic, I then created shot lists and file names for all animations needed. I split the motions accordingly to optimize our motion capture time. We captured all the moves in several motion capture sessions.

This is one of many scenes I worked on. After the motion capture data was applied to the characters, we passed the motions to the layout animators for camera animation. At this point, the character animations were almost final. After the camera animation was finished, many times we tweaked the character animations as needed. We animated for the camera.

Here is a different angle to better show the character and camera animation at the same time.

This is the same animation but now we are viewing through the camera.

Using a camera subtrack in Story Tool, we added rumble and camera shake to enhance the experience. We created a small library of clips for different kinds of rumble, impacts, and shakes.

Afer all character and camera animations were finalized in MotionBuilder, we imported the scenes into Maya for face animation, lighting, and rendering. We built a face rig based on Jason Osipa's book Stop Staring.

Here is the finished scene rendered and composited.