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. '"

Comments

Re:"Oops, no time for discussing compositing"

[PopeRatzo]

Can you please tell them to put down the cutscenes for 5 fucking minutes and finish Starcraft II?

It would be nice if it came out before the fans of the original Starcraft are all collecting social security and unable to afford the 16-core, 64gig RAM systems that it'll need to run.

Even a successful company like Blizzard can miss the bus. The boneyards are littered with the corpses of great game companies who put so much thought and effort and time into a game that by the time it came out nobody cared or the game sucked from overproduction.