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You're now based in the LA office, working directly under Chris, and you guys are mainly doing the dogfighting right now. But what are you here in Austin doing this week?

TL;DRHe is in Austin doing Mannequin training, the animation system driving characters, vehicles and weapons, and helping sound and design teams use it so the weapon mount can be finished and shipped for the firing range.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

It's actually doing some training with Mannequin. What Mannequin is all about is the engine side of things, where it's actually controlling the actual character. So it's basically your marionette on the string, that's kind of what Mannequin's all about. So it's actually driving all the animation that Bryan Brewer and his team have actually been putting together, and how we're putting that all in game right now. So what I'm actually doing is also helping out all the tie-ins from sound, from design, for them to also get up to snuff with Mannequin as well, because Mannequin doesn't drive just the characters. It's actually driving all of our vehicles, all of our weapon animations as well, like the spin-up of the Gatling gun that you guys are seeing with the weapon mount. All that is tied into Mannequin. So all that goes through that whole pipeline of what the engine needs to read in order to see: what animations am I calling? Now at this particular time during the animation, what sounds do I play? What kind of scripting events happen with that? And it's just a huge, huge spider web. So of course I needed to come out here and help you guys out with that, because a lot of guys have got bits and pieces of it. So I just wanted to clear up any sort of issues that we're having with the engine. And so as we roll this stuff out, we're getting the weapon mount fixed up with everything that we need and ship it off to you guys so that you can actually play with it in the firing range.

Wingman's Hangar›ep054 . January 24, 2014·
Published on this date.24 Jan 2014