Fallout's 10th anniversary: Eddie Rainwater profile

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Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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Another day, another developer's profile, with Fallout 1 and 2 artist Eddie Rainwater, one of the men behind the talking heads:<blockquote>I came onto Fallout in it's last year of development along with Scott Rodenheizer to help out with the close up 3D rendered heads. I'd just finished working on the TSR logo cinematic for the Dungeons and Dragons title, which was rendered/composited in Lightwave, and what the heads were being created with for Fallout also, so I guess that helped get me onboard. We both completed the existing character heads (scanned from sculptures) and figured out how to create rendered soft edge ray-traced shadows for the lighting with the help of my friend Mike Sherak (aka Lightwave guru). We also created a series of facial phonems as morph targets, so they could be used for lip syncing. I believe we made facial expressions for A, C, E, F, L, M, U, V, and there were 3 states, neutral, angry and happy. For the intro cinematic, I successfully tested an unused lightwave plugin called morph gizmo that worked WAY better than LWs crappy envelope system. I was pretty happy about that, because another team adopted this into their pipeline after I showed them how much better it worked. I remember acting the parts out and recording the movements for rotoscoping purposes and literally staying up all night looking at wave sound files, and writing down where to keyframe all the mouth movements at 15 frames per second. I had never done this before and was happy to have figured out a way to accomplish this with Sound Forge so the audio would sync up with my rendered video. It's SO much easier nowadays... Back then we had to shoot the scene over to our render farm and wait till the next day to see if it worked once composited with the sound. It was actually a lot of fun figuring all that stuff out.</blockquote>We spruced up the profile with a few talking head images taken from Eddie Rainwater's site, where you can take a look at more of his Fallout work.

Link: Fallout Developers Profile - Eddie Rainwater.
 
Also don't forget lip syncing was one of the most innovative feature of Fallout.
 
13. Who would you bring with you in a future Fallout team and why?

I'd totally work under Leonard and Jason again (except that Leonard and I are both at Blizzard now and have no plans to ever leave). And DEFENITELY Scott Rodenheizer, but I seriously doubt he'll ever make the jump back to games again, just because of the hours and stuff. He's got his own gig going now anways.
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He didn't happen to mention what Leonard works on at Blizzard, did he?
 
pnutz said:
He didn't happen to mention what Leonard works on at Blizzard, did he?
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i suspect he knows full well he could get fired if he told us, so i sincerely doubt it...
 
Well, if it was The Lich King or Starcraft 2 (both announced), I don't think he would have got the axe for uttering Leon's position. I'll take the vagueness to mean that Leon's working on "Hydra".

Anyway, good stuff. Keep em coming!
 
Awesome stuff, at first looking through his profile, I was like heh, he stole the talking heads, and then I realized that he's the one that created them, and I was like.. :shock:
 
pnutz said:
Well, if it was The Lich King or Starcraft 2 (both announced), I don't think he would have got the axe for uttering Leon's position. I'll take the vagueness to mean that Leon's working on "Hydra".
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He's not working on SC 2, so either Lich King or Hydra.
 
Interesting read, providing a good feel for what it might have been like to work on Fallout in that capacity. Happy to hear he seems to be doing well and enjoying himself with Leonard Boyarsky.
 
Rainwater said:
I came onto Fallout in it's last year of development along with Scott Rodenheizer to help out with the close up 3D rendered heads. I'd just finished working on the TSR logo cinematic for the Dungeons and Dragons title, which was rendered/composited in Lightwave, and what the heads were being created with for Fallout also, so I guess that helped get me onboard. We both completed the existing character heads (scanned from sculptures) and figured out how to create rendered soft edge ray-traced shadows for the lighting with the help of my friend Mike Sherak (aka Lightwave guru). We also created a series of facial phonems as morph targets, so they could be used for lip syncing. I believe we made facial expressions for A, C, E, F, L, M, U, V, and there were 3 states, neutral, angry and happy. For the intro cinematic, I successfully tested an unused lightwave plugin called morph gizmo that worked WAY better than LWs crappy envelope system. I was pretty happy about that, because another team adopted this into their pipeline after I showed them how much better it worked. I remember acting the parts out and recording the movements for rotoscoping purposes and literally staying up all night looking at wave sound files, and writing down where to keyframe all the mouth movements at 15 frames per second. I had never done this before and was happy to have figured out a way to accomplish this with Sound Forge so the audio would sync up with my rendered video. It's SO much easier nowadays... Back then we had to shoot the scene over to our render farm and wait till the next day to see if it worked once composited with the sound. It was actually a lot of fun figuring all that stuff out.
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Which is "honored" by Bethesda using a STILL fugly version of their engine and doing nowhere near the same quality of work. Their Talking Heads for Fallout 3 so far are quite inferior and fuglier than the attention to detail and love given to the Talking Heads in both Fallouts. Hell, up to this point, I'd bet Bethesda thought someone fucked around with Photoshop to make the Talking Heads, and planned to use their crappy expressions engine while propping up the Talking Heads with big name voice talent.

Yeah, same devotion and care as the original, indeed. Another Bethesda lie debunked, again.
 
All I can say is, looking through this guy's website makes me very sad that I have no artistic talent as far as drawing and visual art in general is concerned. He does some amazing work.
 
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