Overwatch is a feat of animation, programming, and ideas—a large team of developers individually created each piece and put them together to build the Blizzard first-person shooter as a whole. It’s not often we get to see a piece of that process in motion.
But Overwatch animator David Gibson has pulled back the curtain on the animation process. He posted a video to Twitter of him animating Doomfist’s hero select screen in 2017. It’s a sped up version of the process.
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“My hope is that this will be helpful to fellow animators and approachable enough for anyone who wants to learn more about animation and game development,” Gibson wrote on Vimeo. “None of the work included in this video would even be possible if it wasn’t for the incredible character design, character modelling, and character technical design work by my talented teammates on the Overwatch team at Blizzard Entertainment.”
The video shows Gibson first working with a low-poly iteration of Doomfist to get the form and movement correct. He moves the hero around for a few hours to test out poses and find one that feels right for the character. Once Gibson and the team picks a pose, he works on the details, like facial expressions.
A lot of content has hit Overwatch since it first launched two years ago. When we simply see the finished product, it’s easy to forget about the labor that goes into even the smallest of details.
