Autodesk unhoods the animation behind Assassinâ??s

A range of Autodesk animation tools were used in the production of Assassin’s Creed II, the company has revealed.

The critically acclaimed Ubisoft Montreal title was built on the company’s own Anvil tech, but in its aim to improve on in-game animations, the studio used Autodesk’s HumanIK runtime solution.

“One of the most important aspects of the Assassin’s Creed II gameplay is the ability for characters to climb,” said the game’s lead programmer James Therien.

“HumanIK allowed us to build new climbing moves into the game and iterate them very quickly without ever having to worry about the quality of the [inverted kinematics] solving. Having a package like HumanIK allowed us to address our IK problems quickly without sacrificing results or performance.”

Further Autodesk tools such as 3DS Max and MotionBuilder were used in the game’s production.

“3ds Max is our main content creation package. MotionBuilder was used to clean up all of the motion-capture performance data that was used extensively in cut scenes and fight sequences,” said Therien.