De Engelstalige site Art Whisperer heeft een interview online gezet met Lacey Bannister, een van de vele animators die aan De Sims werkt. Het geeft een goed beeld wat de taak van een animator is en wat er allemaal komt kijken bij het maken van een game.
RobinP: Tell me about how it all begins from concept to actual game. What goes into creating the Sim (either person or Sims Pet)?
LB: Building a game starts with a talented group of designers. These men and women are magical mathematicians, engineers and writers in their own right. They conjur up the epically beautiful scenery, moment-to-moment gameplay, and overall immersive experience we see in video games and especially in the Sims. It begins and ends with a great design.
Once a design is drafted it’s presented to the team at large… producers, artists and engineers alike. We then have the opportunity to give our expertise feedback, what is and isn’t possible. Can we do this smarter, quicker, or in a less complicated way? All of the different discipline’s input is taken very seriously and fed back into the design until the team at large is confident in its execution.
Once a design is sanctioned, it’s put into the hands of the production artists, first being concept artists. They hone the visual look of the environments, characters, and objects you see in a video game by drawing or painting them.. Having a talented team of concept artists can prove to be invaluable to a game’s production as it is much faster to have an artist create a 2-D rendering of an object or character than a 3-D artist to spend weeks building something that had to be, under the worst circumstances, thrown away.
| Art Whisperer: Interview with Lacey Bannister – animator of The Sims |
