The latest issue of IdN magazine features an interview with motion graphics studio Logan’s Alexei Tylevich on his collaboration with Hideo Kojima to create the ten tv-spot-style intros for Metal Gear Solid 4, revealing a fair assessment of game development through the eyes of a design studio.

While what we’re doing is very segmented – the final look comes in the final moments, and you get impatient – in building a videogame, it’s more of a gradual thing. In games, you’re layering it consistently; so by the time you’ve got your engine running really well, even for the person who’s working on low-level stuff, everything looks great.

And on this side, we’re still trapped in this universe that requires such things as massive rendering times, which makes it impossible for us. The better it looks, the heavier it is; for us to change the movement of this character, we have to backtrack and change all these other elements. Whereas on the game, they could look at something on the screen – a door handle, say – and change that doorknob to make it look beautiful. For us, it gets heavier the better it looks. There was a moment I was watching what they were doing and I thought, “I want to do videogames!” Because they’re building this thing – and once it’s in working form, they’re working in real time on beautiful stuff, all within the engine.

Check out these initial pre-vis tests for the Dark Knight movie’s Batpod, done by my old college buddy (and fantastic animator), the equally fantastically named Brendan Body.

One of my most enjoyable parts of game development is the pre-visualisation stage preceeding pre-production. It’s when your imagination can run wild before the harsh realities of real development take hold. I find the animator in a strong position here as complete sequences and gameplay scenarios can be mocked up without any need for a programmer.

Just sneaking in before then end of the year, here is the second and far more comprehensive talk I attended at the earlier ADAPT conference. Happy new year everyone, et bonne année tout le monde.

Industrial Light & Magic: Building Iron Man

Marc Chu – Animation Supervisor

Beginnng with his history, Marc joined ILM in 1994 and has since then served on 20 films, perhaps most notably as Animation Lead on “Pirates of The Caribbean” character Davy Jones. As Ironman was Marvel’s own first fully self-financed feature, they had 6 different companies competing for VFX work. It was interesting to see that despite its reputation, ILM must still compete for bang-for-buck value as film studios are keen to shop around. It comes as no surprise though, that the work was won in part on the back of the impressive Transformers work.

To this end, he showed a rough animation test of Iron Man taking off done over the course of two weeks. ILM has plentiful archive footage from which it can draw resources, and for this piece air footage repurposed from Ang Lee’s Hulk was used to create a high-quality flight sequence.

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The latest edition of HDRI Magazine has a front-page article on an interview with Shareef Shanawany, Visual Effects Lead on Mass Effect. There are some details on the post-processes that really defined the look of the game, as well as the fantastic work employed for the biotics using the crust system.

I’ve always thought Mass retained something of the same look as all the other games rendered in the Unreal 3 Engine, but perhaps we did manage to put our own stamp on it with little tricks like the grain filter and custom depth-of-field, (the DOF in the image above was Unreal 3’s default at the time). And if I wouldn’t love to make a game locked at 24fps with motion blur.

As far as I’m aware, this is the first time they’ve run a cover story on videogame VFX, which is usually the territory of film and television only. Definitely a great step forward and some great recognition for the excellent work done by Shareef and the rest of the VFX team, even if they did kill the framerate throughout (and to a degree, post) production ;-)

Fellow Eidos team members Thierry and Sebastien (BARONTiERi and Reinart respectively of STEAMBOT Studios) have just released their first Gnomon instructional art DVDs. Not animation, but Character Design and Matte Painting.

Go buy them and laugh at their funny French accents.

A name like a bad guy from a Van Damme flick hasn’t stopped Johnny Lee from creating some incredibe 3D apps using a Wii remote connected to a PC, most recently this fantastic DIY Desktop Virtual Reality Display.

I recently saw Beowulf in full Imax 3D and came out wondering two things.

• Why did they bother to make it in CG anyway?
• Why aren’t we pursuing full 3D in games?

I’m sure we’ve all played a round of Quake with cheap VR glasses at some point in the past, but could you imagine how impressive the current generation of games would look, even if the quality was likened to split-screen to provide two displays? The VR fad all but died outside of academia since it’s brief flirt with the mass audience via more up-market arcades in the 90s, but I’ve always believed it will resurface at some point when the technology becomes affordable, (and side-effects like headaches and nausea are overcome).

With major hollywood directors like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson now looking towards 3D to bring crowds back into the cinemas, I’m confident the experience provided by film’s linear and passive nature would be easily trounced by that of a fully interactive 3D world, the likes of which videogames have been creating for decades.

Now a smaller note-taking session, a result only of the vast amount of content on show so as to keep one’s eyes away from the notepad.

Industrial Light & Magic: VFX Used On Transformers

Todd Vaziri – VFX Sequence Supervisor for Transformers

One of the most entertaining presentations of the week, due to both Todd’s upbeat yet humble attitude and the sheer multitude of videos displayed during the presentations, ranging from multiple render-passes highlighting the various explorations of lighting and materials on the robotic protagonists to behind-the-scene shots of the film plates throughout the various layers of post-production layering.

Incredibly heart-warming were the animation renders illustrating the sheer amount of cheating going on when characters went off-screen. With the original brief requiring 14 robots in total, they scoped for only 14 transformation animations, but ended up creating over 140 due to each transformation being created specifically to sell the particular shot. Some examples shown had Transformers’ legs going through the ground, various parts scaling into the body to be hidden away, even bits flying off only to return just at the moment they were required on camera – just like our cutscenes!

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I’ve added the second Adapt 2007 lecture notes below…

Halon: The Value of Pre-Visualisation

Dan Gregoire – Pre-viz supervisor on Star Wars Episodes II and III, War of The Worlds, X-Men 3 and Ghost Rider

This talk was especially of interest to me as we were just finishing the pre-vis work for a handful of outlandish actions and animation systems in my current project – a valuable process that not only helped prove their viability, but also how the visual look of the systems will play out.

These notes will be of interest to anyone currently planning out cutscene requirements, or teams looking to pre-visualise how certain gameplay elements or level action sequences might play out in something more advanced than simple documentation or even storyboard form.

With a background in videogames and animated television, Dan was drafted in to create pre-visualisations for effects-heavy scenes midway Star Wars Episode II, then continued this work on the Episode III, choreographing difficult sequences such as the fight between Yoda and Palpatine.

In addition to working on movie pre-viz, Halon is also involved in animated movies such as the upcoming Avatar and Speed Racer, as well as the recent Halo 3 “Believe” adverts. Near the beginning of the talk Dan asked the audience “Who uses pre-viz?”, and was met with a resoundingly lacking show of hands, to which he replied, “You should be”.

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