{"id":1208,"date":"2026-08-30T10:59:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T10:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BadSmallCat.com\/wp\/?page_id=1208"},"modified":"2026-08-30T17:14:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:14:40","slug":"shadow-of-the-colossus","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/BadSmallCat.com\/wp\/?page_id=1208","title":{"rendered":"Shadow of the Colossus"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Personal Projects\/Tinkerings | 2025<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

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‘Shadow of the Colossus’ sits, along with it’s two siblings, ‘Ico’ and ‘The last Guardian’, atop a list of the most impactful video games of all time.\u00a0 Each of them in turn bringing new innovative achievements, both technical and artistic.<\/em><\/p>\n

All three of these marvels are keystones in video game development chronology and have played a pivotal role in advancing the medium in so many ways, as well as having significant influence with many developers\/players along the way.<\/p>\n

The original Playstation 2 project development on SOTC demanded incredible solutions in order to overcome a multitude of technical hurdles, these included..<\/p>\n

Streaming of a gigantic seamless landscape with zero loading time and almost invisible LOD popup.<\/em><\/strong>
\nCloth physics simulation<\/em><\/strong>
\nIK solution for characters<\/em><\/strong>
\nFur rendering solution (using a clever layering approach)<\/em><\/strong>
\nBloom lighting vfx<\/em><\/strong>
\nDeformable, traversable collision<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

… all running on a PS2 with its 32 Megabyte RAM, 4MB VRAM.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to believe they even managed to get SOTC working at all on the PS2..\u00a0 \u00a0the same can be said of both ‘Ico’ and ‘The Last Guardian’ on their respective target platforms at the time.<\/p>\n

I’m so very grateful to Team Ico for what they have done and just want to thank them for being the brave and ambitious group of individuals that they are.<\/p>\n

A little aside here.. and pet peev if you will \ud83d\ude09<\/strong><\/p>\n

Video game development is a team effort, as such the entire team should be acknowledged and not just the figure-head as tends to happen.\u00a0 Clearly Mr Ueda was a major driving force on Team Ico production with overall direction and design input but we mustn’t overlook the brilliance of the rest of the highly skilled and talented team.\u00a0 \u00a0I tire of hearing Youtube streamers etc only ever mentioning the name of ‘Hidetaka Miyazaki’ when referring to the Souls series games, as if he made the games single-handed.<\/p>\n

The animators responsible for the work on the original PS2 version of SOTC and who deserve recognition for the character motion sets, were..<\/strong><\/em>
\nAtsuko Fukuyama<\/a>, Masanobu Tanaka<\/a>, Daisuke Uchikawa<\/a>, S\u014dsuke Honda<\/a>, Tatsuhiko Tachibe<\/a> (EEN Inc.), Rory Little<\/a><\/p>\n

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My own love\/fascination and tinkerings with SOTC<\/h2>\n

The re-animation of Cerberus (known to the fan-base as Cenobia)<\/em><\/h3>\n

As a preface here, I want to give high praise to the original animators who were\\are a great deal more talented than myself.. and considering that many of the original SOTC developers were, at the time, new to video game development, only adds to just how impressive these individuals were\\are.<\/p>\n

On having extracted the Cerberus character mesh from the original PS2 titles ISO using a great little free tool that I found floating around the internet, namely the ‘SOTC Viewer’, I just had to take on the mini-project of re-UVing, skinning and rigging, the Cerberus character.. in turn to allow me to add some motion as I couldn’t find any way to extract the original animation data.<\/p>\n

I treated the whole thing as a learning exercise in how the original colossi characters were created.<\/p>\n

The starting point was to re-UV the mesh to get a clean base.\u00a0 The extracted UV’s from the viewer were fragmented and generally a complete mess which I wanted to be clean as I initially had ideas of possibly importing the finished article to a game engine (possibly UE5) to allow me to rebuild a motion-set and some basic AI behavior within a small test-bed environment.. just for fun \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

In the past I had done a similar thing with the Combine Strider character from Half-Life 2 in order to play around with animating a tri-ped based character.. so this was my original plan at least.<\/p>\n

I’ve animated various quadrupeds in the past, cats, dogs etc, for various games that I’ve worked on, even a few 4-legged alien critters, so already had some idea of what to expect and how best to rig such a character within Motion Builder. I chose to use Mobu because I’m very familiar with it for motion editing work and tend to lean towards it for a multitude of reasons as a preference over Maya for character animation work…\u00a0 at least when dealing with bipeds\/quadrupeds.\u00a0 \u00a0I would then be exporting motion data to Maya as a back-end (mainly because UVing and Skinning are done there; Mobu is solely an animation tool).<\/p>\n

Part of the reason I chose to take on this mini project in the first place was to get an understanding of what was involved in developing a SOTC character, with all of the gameplay features that were needed, such as the approach to rendering fur on a PS2, the IK solution, the look controller.. even the shader for the eyes etc. but also the fact it was all quite low poly yet through the shading and lighting along with the motion the end product always felt very organic, which fascinated me and I wanted to understand how this was all achieved. The low poly aspect would of course also make things a tad easier, particularly when dealing with the multiple layers of fur.<\/p>\n

My goal from a look perspective was to honour the low fidelity vibe of the original PS2 and to use only the original PS2 textures..\u00a0 the original game code needing to all fit snugly within the 32MB RAM and 4MB VRAM footprint of the PS2 whilst achieving a load-less gigantic free-roam environment with dynamically lit psuedo global illumination providing the soft ambiance .. unlike modern day blockbusters that can have 16GB of RAM and 8-16GB of VRAM to play with along with lightning fast SSD’s..\u00a0 \u00a0it really makes you realise just how impressive a feat the original SOTC was to pull off and the cleverness of the various technological tricks used.<\/p>\n

You can get a run down of the technology that needed to be developed by Team Ico here..
\nThe Making Of “Shadow Of The Colossus”<\/a><\/p>\n

The Cerberus animations (Walk and Run) were kept as close as possible to the original motion using key poses and timings based on the original PS2 animation.\u00a0 Essentially I was replicating the original motion for look and feel.<\/p>\n

Cerberus (Cenobia) combined walk->run turntable
\nAnimated in MotionBuilder, rendered in Maya<\/strong><\/p>\n