Following a successful collaboration on Resident Evil 7, Technicolor Games again joined with Capcom to deliver an epic survival horror game reimagined, based on the classic Resident Evil 2. Released in 1998, the original Resident Evil 2is considered a gaming industry masterpiece – one that enjoys huge mainstream success with nearly 5 million copies sold.
The remake for a new generation of gamers features more realistic, organic motion in the animations as players engage with scary enemy humanoid characters, canine zombie dogs, and other creepily attacking creatures. For their part, Technicolor Animation & Games handled body and facial Mo-Cap cleanup and Keyframe Animation for enemy characters in Resident Evil 2, working closely with Capcom’s Mikhail and Andrew Weil on the production side and Onishi-san on the creative end.
Selvam Venkatesan, Animation Department Director, Games, recounted one of the many opportunities the team had to flex their skills: “One challenging sequence that Technicolor animators had fun with were the creatures known as Lickers. Mo-Cap data was all shot on the ground, but we were able to use that same data to animate them climbing and moving around on both walls and roof.”
Using Faceware, the Technicolor Animation & Games team was also instrumental in producing realistic facial animation for the player characters. Utilizing facial performance data of the actors from Mo-Cap and re-targeting it to their game characters, Technicolor artists were able to take the essence of their performances to bring their facial expressions, and thus their game characters, to bold new life.
