Slashdot Mirror
Speaking With the Blizzard Cinematics Team
TheFrunj writes "Blizzard's games, such as World of Warcraft and StarCraft, are perhaps known for their breathtaking cinematics as much as for their gameplay. The process behind these cinematics is complex, involving an entire modeling and coding team — they even needed to make their own physics engine! AtomicMPC has the full story behind these incredible videos. Quoting: 'Storyboards become animated storyboards (thanks to a storyboard team who are also trained animators) complete with temporary music to help set the tone and get the pacing right. Then the animators and modeling team get involved, creating a rough 3D version of the final animation. While the modeling team works on characters and environments, the animators work with very low polygon characters and as the models are refined and updated the animations are refined. This is also where production technicians get involved, supporting the more technical developments like hair and skeletal systems for the characters. And then the effects team kicks into gear. '"
Too bad we just get one of these each year or so :(
Geeze, I could have done it myself by now.
Waiting
As a compositor, it's probably just me, but it seems like every article on post production effects (for movies, games, commercials, etc) spends so much time on modeling, effects and lighting that by the time the writer has hit the compositing part of the pipeline they've- oops! run out of time.
There are fantastic modelers, trackers, texture artists, lighters etc in the pipeline, but here's the thing- all of us share the burden of producing a good looking shot equally.
Without a good model, no amount of work by the texture artist lighter and compositor can make the shot look good. Without good texture art, the lighter will never get good light play off the model. Without good lighting, the compositor's workload increases 100 times as he now has to "fake" lighting and shadows in 2d. Without good compositing, excellent lighting, modeling and texturing will still scream CG to any audience.
Personally, I find it very cool to be at the end of the pipeline- things come to me and I get to throw them into the pot; stir and make the entire shot come together. I feel bad for the modelers and animators who don't get to see their final product- what I send to the client is what I see on the big screen in another month.
Of course, being at the end of the pipeline would be cooler if all the magazine editors didn't run out of space at the end of the article :(
www.GrenadeHop.com
The "crappy prerendered cutscenes" are what we are discussing, and do "count," as those are considered the "cinematic" portion of the game.
Will be nice when graphics improve so much that their cinematics-engine coding-team ends up developing the new gameplay engine for the next iteration of the game at large :P Still, WoW will never split the graphics engine, other MMOs tried and failed. Instead, they continually make upgrades that make it prettier at the top end while still supporting low-end rigs.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
A cut scene is a sequence in a video game over which the player has little or no control, often breaking up the gameplay and used to advance the plot, present character development, and provide background information, atmosphere, dialogue and clues. Cut scenes can either be animated or use live action footage.
[...]
Cut scenes are sometimes also referred to by other terms such as cinematics or in game movies. Cut scenes that are streamed from a video file are sometimes also referred to as full motion video or FMV.
So... yeah.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Because all those 3D animators should totally get on to fixing that server code, right? The guy who's worked for years honing his skill at storyboarding ought to be annoying^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhelping the engine programmers while they try and fix that stupid graphical bug, right?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
"Finally we can learn to make our next good game since Space Invaders!"
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
I have mixed feelings about the Starcraft cinematics.
Video-production-wise, they were not just par but good (or higher) for the course. They were interlaced, not exactly high-res and 256 color palette (IIRC). But damn those zergs attacking the terrans in the science vessel sent you "omg, this is baaad".
But narration-wise, they didn't do much. The first can be summarised as "two terrans get ambushed by zergs in the wastelands". Great, but that's only a minor piece of the story. The bulk of the story is told, not shown (nor played).
To me, they seem like they're bling which is there mostly for the sake of being bling. That doesn't mean they're good bling, though ;-)
Let's compare to Warcraft III (Say, reign of chaos since that's what I know best). Each campaign has two (pre-rendered) cinematic videos: one at the beginning and one at the end. During the game there are video sequences for briefings and story development. They are rendered on the fly, by the game engine, and the transition back and forth between playing and watching is quite smooth.
Also, you feel like you're participating in the store more (in WC3). I think it's the interspersed videos showing your characters (well, units) playing out the zero-choice points in the story. By having it shown rather than told, you experience the story more cohesively (the individual "story points" have more and stronger connections). It might also be that the story is "narrower": it doesn't skip over too many events (so the "story points" are closer together). It might also just be a better written story, not sure.
I think Starcraft has a good story with an interesting theme: the struggle of control vs. freedom and rebellion against governmental, familial (Kerrigan "vs." sibling cerebrates and a parental Overmind) and religious authority.
But Warcraft III beats it on execution, on how the story is told.
Being someone who has studied animation and storyboarding, I really am not surprised that Blizzard go to such lengths for their cinematics...though this article probably gives some insight to those who don't really know much about the animation industry.
Also, it's nice to see Blizzard getting kudos because while they're probably not the only ones who put so much work into their animations, they certainly have produced some of the best game cinematics I have ever seen.
I think it would be safe to say that companies such as Square Enix use similar methods for their animations but Blizzard seem to be better at having a more polished end result.
they even needed to make their own physics engine
You mean, like pretty much everybody else back then?
Am I the only one who could care less about cinematics in video games?
Any time I am playing a game and a cut scene occurs, all it does is remove me from the game play, and I just find the "skip" button as quickly as possible.
When I am playing a game, I want it to be interactive. I want control, I want to act as the character. Cut scenes and cinematics totally detract from that - they take me out to a third person view they act like the "third wall" still exists, when in the rest of the game, it does not exist.
At the end of it - if I wanted to watch a film, that is what I would be doing, not playing a video game.
I wish all of these cut scenes and cinematics were just add-ons later or dropped; imagine how much quicker a game could be released if so much time and money was not invested in this.
Personally I like the cutscenes which are rendered by the game engine, it just feels more contiguous with the game. The Halo series did this pretty well, it also enabled them to have something like 2 hours of cutscenes without a separate cinematics disc.
If they could fire all these cinematic guys, the money spent on them could be better spent on game designers and programmers. We'd get better games and the cinematic guys can go get jobs in hollywood like they should have done to start. I play video games for good gameplay, and go to the movies for good cinematics. They actually don't mix very well as one is completely passive and the other an active activity.
Hey, I still remember being amazed by the cutscenes in the original Ninja Gaiden
No sig for the moment.