Summary
It was the autumn of 2004 when players of Microsoft's first version of the Xbox® video game system were treated to their first glimpse of Albion, the other-worldly setting of Fable, a role-playing game that would prove to be like no other. Despite nearly 6 years of imaginative and technical development, the creative team of 30 artists at what had been called Big Blue Box—and became Lionhead Studios—possessed what would prove to be modest expectations for their labor of love. It would quickly become the fastest-selling Xbox game and, as this article is being written, sales of the game—in which a player's every decision defines who he or she becomes—have gone over 3 million units.

And the significant changes didn't end there. Central to Fable II is each player's "faithful companion," an absolutely, unerringly loyal canine to accompany players from childhood through the life of the game. The emotional connection to the animal is surprisingly effective and affecting, adding an emotional depth to the sequel.
"The creation of a believable dog character was an incredibly tricky proposition for our artists and technical team," says Lovett. "We had a talented team dedicated to the dog almost constantly through the development of the project. Pouring the appropriate amount of love into that animal so that it would move and emote believably proved tremendously tough. When you combine that work with a morphing hero or heroine who is changing according to a wide variety of decisions, the sheer volume of work and assets gets to be staggering."
The Solution
To achieve enhanced efficiency and productivity amidst a potentially overwhelming number of assets, Lovett spearheaded the use of Autodesk Softimage for the major project and a new platform:
"We were going to have to rewrite our tools in order to bring the new game to the Xbox 360," says Lovett. "So, it seemed like a good time to reevaluate our toolset and figure out how we could achieve a more cohesive production pipeline. Autodesk Softimage has excellent modeling tools together with extremely flexible animation tools, and our engineers were able to use it quickly and easily."
Lionhead Lead Technical Artist Fernando Navarro points to the interoperability made possible by Autodesk Softimage as a crucial benefit of the software:
"Autodesk Softimage is our main asset creation tool for a variety of reasons. The fact that we can talk to other applications including Autodesk 3ds Max software, ZBrush, and Adobe Photoshop has given us an incredibly powerful framework for jobs like Fable II. We used dotXSI and XML animation formats to export all our final data. FableEd, our in-house editorial tool, was specifically tailored to blend and transform a massive amount of data."
For Technical Artist Michael Malinowski, the volume of creatures and characters, all of which can vary drastically in both size and fundamental characteristics, required a potentially prohibitive number of animations. True to form, however, the resourceful Lionhead animation team used Autodesk Softimage to devise a solution:
"We effectively worked through that challenge by creating a deformation hierarchy in our principle rig," says Malinowski. "We would then read out all transforma tion data in XML format. Instead of reading straight transformation data, however, we calculated the size of the offsets between our template character and the specific character being animated. That way, we were able to export all our individual characters, regardless of their proportions, to an appropriately sized skeleton."
The Results
Navarro also explains that Lionhead's production pipeline is seamlessly integrated into Autodesk Softimage through custom toolbars and support tools:
"All of our rigs and meshes are annotated with custom properties containing valuable extra information for the game engine," he says. "Through the sequencer and DirectX viewports, we can preview any object before it reaches the game. It's worth noting that a team of just two technical artists and two riggers accomplished the enormous task associated with handling, rig
ging, and exporting objects to the game itself. Emilio Serrano, Mike Malinowski, and Louise Ridley have been the stars in this dynamic, often chaotic environment."
For their part, Lovett and Malinowski are quick to praise Autodesk Softimage software's "Generalized Attribute Transfer Operator" or GATOR:
"GATOR has been especially useful," says Lovett. "Transferring vertex weighting data from one model to another was always a difficult and time-consuming process. Suddenly, we had GATOR to do it with one easy method. We used it extensively in our workflow. Autodesk Softimage software's flexibility also enabled us to code our own solutions, which was a huge boon to the project."
"Having huge amounts of assets requiring complex skinning was an immense task," adds Malinowski. "GATOR was a fundamental tool in this process, and helps us form a base from which to start. Simply put, GATOR is an integral part of our pipeline and, without a doubt, it saved us a massive amount of time when it came to skinning."Though only released a few months ago, Fable II has already sold more than 2.5 million units, while being recognized as "Game of the Year" by a wide variety of knowledgeable sources and publications.