On Viva Piñata I played many roles; Lead artist, animator, technical artist, modeller, UI artist, and box art builder. I was there to lead, support, and fill in wherever I was needed.
I was luckily enough to be working with a brilliant team who let me do all this stuff.
Certainly for the first game, I did a little bit of character animation. At the time I was still trying to split time between this and what was then called Banjo-X. I only did animation for a hand full of animals, before letting the new animators on the team take it up.
On VP2, I looked after the background models+texturing. We had added the desert and snowy areas for trapping new piñatas. We also added new surface types of sand and snow. I remember working with our great graphics programmer to make the lovely snow and ice we ended up with.
The joys of marking up paths for the piñatas to come into the garden. It wasn't a glamorous job, but I always felt that taking on this maintenance like work allowed the other members of the art team get on with the more creative stuff.
Oh, how I like trees! These, like the other plants could grow in all kinds of ways, so their growing animations, even though very simple as animation goes, had to be split before going into the game. The game could then join together the various parts of animation to let only certain parts of the plant grow depending on how much space it had, or how well you looked after it.
The trees also had lots of mark up on them like fruiting points, hits and paths for the climbing Piñata.
On top of all the technical stuff, I also modelled and textured them all. Body Paint 3D was a super package to use.
In those days, I tracked everything in spread sheets, so we could see easily what was still needed to do and who was doing it. The monkey tree plan on the left was how the designers let me know how the tree needed to grow. Using these notes and Ryan's wonderful concept art, I could then go off an make the models and colour them in.
For some of the things we did, I was able to highlight bits of workflow that could benefit from some amount of automation and write MEL scripts in Maya to assist. Two that stand out are, firstly, the tool for marking up the trees correctly and adding the right joints and hits and stuff. The tool could also export all the separate animations need to make it grow properly; this one was especially useful, as it took a while to run and was perfect for over lunch.
All the appear cutscenes used in the game were built from the in-game animations that the piñata used. I wrote a tool that would grab all the animations and convert them to TRAX clips and prep the character on a motion path, ready for the animator to then build up the short sequence.
This is the prototype exploding piñata. This one used the rigid body system in Maya, but the game used it's own system. I wrote a tool for this that would make a 'exploded' version of the piñata's body mesh.
None of these tools were really very complicated. It's always about spotting the pressure points and providing enough tools to make the artist's and animator's work easier and speedier.
I also oversaw the making of the box art. I can tell you a story about the render of the horse on the front there, but not now.
On the first game I did some of the XUI stuff for the UI. XUI was Microsofts own sort of version of Flash/Actionscript. It worked okay, but I remember it was a bit fiddly at times. Using it though meant that some of the little animation like things sliding on/off and the like could be done by us rather than the software engineers.
On the second game I made the art of the UI too. This time round the focus was on Piñata Central and the story of how Pester had wiped all the records. The UI had a bright, colourful, computer-ee looked about it.
Viva Piñata made it into Rare Replay in 2015. Here's the little featurette where we talk a little bit about how it was made.
Thanks for looking! If you know anyone looking for an artist like me, then let me know!
