The Flying Trapeezees

This was my first project at Large Animal Games, and it kicked off with a pretty big challenge: figuring out how to create acrobatic animations for a variety of characters across the game. The game involved following a family of trapeze artists, touring France and bringing joy to the crowds with their stunts. To achieve the movements, I proposed a novel solution not used very much in the company at the time—building and testing fully rigged 3D characters that could be animated and then rendered out for use in-game. The tests looked fantastic, and that approach ended up becoming a key element of the production pipeline. I modeled and animated each character, which gave us a ton of flexibility with animation and expressions--but most of all this direction really brought the aesthetic of the game world to life. To this day, I still aim to find unique solutions to tricky challenges, and often still see 3D as a useful tool even in 2D worlds and interfaces.