Humber worked with Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) to create models, animations, and environments that demonstrate AMD’s proprietary technology. Working with AMD, a team of 3D Animation, Art and Design students not only refined a character model, “Rat Boy,” the company had created, but also created an entire subway environment to display the character, and animated the character in order to show off AMD’s TressFX technology, which gives realistic hair and fur movement to video game characters.
Working to a tight deadline, the team of students from the 3D Animation, Art and Design program delivered work that was of higher quality than AMD had expected. The students were tasked to further refine the character (Rat Boy) that AMD had already created, develop a subway environment to display the character, and animate the character in a way that shows off AMD’s TressFX tech, which gives video game characters more realistic hair/fur movement. The final outcome was a TressFX technology demo, which the company showed this year at GDC 2017, the largest annual gathering of professional game developers. The company also plans to publish the student work on GPUOpen. Ryan Mayne, a 3D Game Developing Technician at AMD, is a Humber alumni from the 3D Animation, Art & Design program, and worked with the Humber talent to help fully flesh out this character.
The students expressed their interest in the project and gaining hands-on experience in the 3D Animation industry, understanding how to develop a project from the beginning, planning stages to final deliverable at the standard that is realistic in the industry, rather than just a hypothetical situation in a classroom setting.
The students’ eagerness to learn stood out to Sean Skelton, who does research and development for AMD. He was impressed by their enthusiasm. “They really stepped up to the plate and worked really hard to get what needed to be done, done,” Skelton said. “They went above and beyond what was required of them.”
“They got to know a bit about how the workflow is, and the pipeline of creating the final project deliverable and bringing it in, getting feedback,” said Ryan Mayne, a 3D game developing technician for AMD and graduate of Humber. “They delivered on the finished character as promised. It was the quality we expected – actually better quality than we expected.”
Skelton was happy with the scene and the animations as a final result, as the character was brought to life in a way that exceeded expectations. “We enjoyed the collaboration that we had, and we look forward to pursuing further collaboration with Humber,” Skelton said.
