Square Enix: The Technology of FINAL FANTASY

Taku Murata – General Manager, Technical Research Division

Traditionally, a new platform was created for each title, with the game first made in Japanese and translations following much later. This looks set to change with the latest upcoming releases which will be very exciting to many western fans, and the target platforms (for the engine) are PS3, PC and XBOX360.

Murata’s history reads like something of a chronology of technological breakthroughs in Japanese game development, with much of his work driven by animation – in particular facial animation. Of interest most of all was the admission that several of the driving forces for this new engine centred on displaying characters’ faces to a very high fidelity in close-up.

1997 – Final Fantasy Tactics: First time using real-time previewing on the console, convincing Murata of the power of this approach. The game was edited on PS1 in realtime, driven by the artists’ requests.

2000 – Vagrant Story: Used a unified tool to create cutscenes, preview textures and visual effects. Apart from the opening FMV, every cinematic was in-game and featured skeleton/bone animation for the first time. One requirement was that the team had to preview facial texture animations to ensure they looked good without anti-aliasing. Murata spoke at length about what he called “peak-points”, which are presumably normals. Apparently they had to change the peak-points relative to the camera to maintain the facial integrity. Lots of post-effect and field-of-view corrections, such as a fish-eye lens filter, were employed in order to promote a wide range of facial expressions.

2004 – Data Standardisation: Established a common 3D data format. Within the company there was a big debate over whether to use COLLADA, FBX or a proprietary file format, with each team previously using a different format. They eventually decided on their own proprietary data format, but the integration process wasn’t easy, especially when convincing certain entrenched teams.

2005 – Tech Division Established: Murata’s team was formally created with the objective of establishing a company-wide technology.

2006 – Final Fantasy XII: Team sizes by this time were incomparable to previous projects and as such brought with them large volumes of assets required to be created by staff with diverse skill levels. To aid this, Murata’s team created separate tool sets for different needs and skill levels.

2007 – Crystal Tools: The company-wide technology was finally rolled out. Previously named the “White Engine” , the Crystal Tools platform is the result of Murata’s team’s work. The essence of the Crystal Tools was described as thus:

• Must support extensive use of character close-ups.
• Focus on stylised facial expressions designed to promote the anime style.
• Must allow detailed control of characters.
• Specialises in physics, visual effects, post-effects and Graphical User Interface.
• Must support a large team, with a detailed division of work.
• Contains seperate tools for different functions.

With an extensive use of GUI to accommodate veterans and novices alike and focusing on ease of use, the Crystal Tools are currently being used for the production of Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIII Versus and unannounced next-gen MMORPG. Separate teams for separate tools allowed v1.0 to be created in a year, though as is often the case in engine development they did not employ a technical writer so the documentation suffered. This is an area that game developers are slowly coming around to, where complex tools and system are created on an almost daily basis but oftentimes their power is not realised due to bad or lacking documentation.

Apparently, after one post-session questioner inquired, Murata admitted that Square Enix cannot currently license tools due to documentation, but possibly in the future – something very interesting indeed should the chance to work with their tools arise. Of all the tools mentioned, (Character Viewer, Effects Editor, Cutscene Editor, Layout Tool and Sound Maker), I fortunately managed to find screens online of the two most interesting to videogame animators.

Character Viewer: The Character Viewer is only for previewing of textures and animation and exists on PC only, with modeling and animation still created in Maya or XSI. It clearly displays a hierarchy view though, hinting towards additional character set-up that could be performed and maintained from within this external viewer.

Cutscene Editor: Bearing a resemblance to Unreal Engine 3′s “Matinee”, the Cutscene Editor offers timeline control over cinematography, visual effects and audio all in a single editor. The multi-screen view shows that this is an editor and not simply a tool in which to re-construct pre-exported cameras and cutscene assets, with an asset browser and animation curves clearly visible towards the lower right.

Sora Ltd: Development – SUPER SMASH BROS. BRAWL

Masahiro Sakurai -Director

Despite directing the original SSB games under the Nintendo/HAL Laboratory collaboration, Sakurai has been working as a freelance game designer since 2004 under his own company Sora Ltd. – (the company comprises just him and his assistant). After sub-contracing creative direction to Sora, Nintendo rented offices in Tokyo and employed the bulk of staff from long-time development house Game Arts. In addition, they temporarily contracted many of the original Smash Bros team for this project as HAL were not officially involved.

This is the way I’d like to see the game development process go in the future so we can move away from the restrictive full-time studio model towards a more talent based one where individual creatives and full development teams can be married, before disbanding once the pipelines and initial creative visions are established.

Sakurai continued with the challenges faced in developing such a diverse character roster,admitting that they were “blessed” with having characters from many famous games. By July 7th 2005, all the planning docs were finalised, as was the roster. The character line-up was only reduced from there on, except Sonic who was added in 2007.

CharacterDesign:

• Listing his requirements for a successful character design in SSBB, Sakurai pointed to individuality, ease of implementation and qualities that would bring balance to the roster.
• Some rights issues prevented even Nintendo characters from being included.
• He wanted characters with unique visuals to stand out.
• The team had to unify the art style somewhat, drawing a comparision between Mario vs Link throwing up inconcistencies like Bugs Bunny cartoons vs Photo-real.

• Changes that were made included a washed-out colour pallette and detailed textures for some of the more cartoony characters. Notably, Nintendo allowed them to add more details to Mario despite usually enforcing strict style guidelines.
• Thankfully body proportions were not unified, allowing for an interesting variety in deliberate mis-matchs of character sizes.
• Sakurai pointed towards an improvement in the team’s ability rather than Wii’s power facilitating an increase in visual fidelity.
• All of the team’s “interpretations” of characters were supervised and approved by the original character creators.
• Kid Icarus main protagonist Pit, who had not been updated in 20 years, had to be completely redesigned in order to fit with other characters that had improved and moved with the times – requiring the original creator’s consent. At this point the talk spent an uncomfortably long time examining the finer points of Pit’s jewelry and sarong, betraying the Japanese fascination with effeminate male characters.

Character Animation:

This latter section was by far the most interesting part of the talk, mostly due to the clearly determined approach in which Sakurai dictated animation timing and posing to his team. To this end, he began by thinking of moves with the approach that one must maintain a “preciseness and steadfast confidence that the move will work.”

• Every attack in the game can be broken down into 4 component parts or phases:
  • StandBy – either the idle pose or the fall for mid-air assaults – (essentially the first frame).
  • WindUp – the initial buildup as the character draws back in anticipation of the attack. This should never take longer than 0.75 seconds.
  • Strike – the strongest pose, seen often by players as the action pauses here when a hit lands.
  • FollowThrough – after the attack, the period of vulnerability following a missed move. It is important that this pose must not look like the StandBy, and typically is the longest part of the move.
• The animations needed to be exaggerated in order to ensure the player had enough visual feedback following a key-press as well as warn the opponent to dodge.
• Translating each of these 4 stages for each action into numbers greatly aided the designers.
• Every action was hand-done in key-frame, involving no motion capture.

• Sakurai’s method for illustrating moves to his animation and design team relied on the use of side-on photographs of “Microman” poseable action figures (above) to convey each of the four attack stages visually.
• He dictated every pose, but said the final quality was down to the animator. Nevertheless, I believe this would be a hard sell to Western developers even with a track record such as his.
• Stringently enforcing the posing in this manner, however, insured the moves would work within the game and the number of changes to animation for balancing purposes was reduced.

When balancing the game, he closed with the advice that parameters, motions and “character essence” must all be consistent and are the most important elements of all. (eg. weight of Mario and Samus makes them fall differently). Furthermore, he feels it is imperative that a designer sniffs out why design decisions are made in other games and learn from them. Game designers must only take a “try out and see” iterative approach when they have enough lee-way and time to do so.

Sony Pictures Imageworks: A Believable Character Postmortem: Motion Capture on the Virtual Set of BEOWULF

Parag Halvadar – Lead R&D Engineer

Hailing from the same studio that created Monster House, Halvadar’s talk concentrated on facial motion as that’s a recent topic for games industry. As is often the case with movie industry approaches they couldn’t directly be recreated for use in a game development situation, but nonetheless provided an interesting insight into some of the lengths that must be gone to in search of the (some say, false) holy grail of truly photo-real virtual characters.

The first portion of the talk involved simply tallying the vast amounts of data, equipment and effort used in the production:

• 260 Vicon MX40 cameras were used synchronously to record motion.
• Body, facial and hand motion were captured simultaneously.
• An Electro Oculograph (EOG) was used to record eye-tracking.
• 20 actors could be captured simultaneously.
• Actions were captured in a 55x55x25ft volume.
• 81 actors were tracked over the course of the movie.
• 4 horses.
• 1 pony. (Only one?!)
• 46 days of shooting.
• 250 props made and captured.

The second portion detailed the methods required to bring the faces to “life”. It must be said that, despite often firmly entrenched in the Uncanny Valley as is always the case with attempts to simulate realistic facial motion, Beowulf has done the best job yet at providing real glimpses of coming up the other side. The tallies continue:

• 4 layers of face rigs.
• 3D facial models did not match actors faces in a 1:1 ratio, (Ray Winstone in particular), causing lots of marker-swapping.
• Adhered to FACS (Facial Action Coding System), to recreate all the muscles of a human face, totalling around 60 facial expressions (including head motions), with 16 different phoneme shapes.
• Face poses were created from combinations of weights of a smaller set of basic poses.
• Motion-capture values were run through a script to find the closest match with the facial expressions and were replaced with blendshapes.
• The EOG recorded horizontal and vertical eye movement, saccades and blinks via and eyepack on back with electrodes by the eyes to detect eye-muscle movements.

It should be noted that, while in my opinion the face of Angelina Jolie was the most successful and consistent in quality throughout all shots involved, Halvadar explained that hers was the scan that was deliberately adjusted the most to form an exaggerated impression of how we picture her, backing up my belief that realism is simply just not realistic enough when it comes to artistic endeavours such as this. This was also apparent in the scene of her naked, gold-dripping body emerging from the water – something which he felt the need to show several times over and was also manipulated drastically due to her pregnancy at the time of shooting.

In closing, it was most interesting of all that Halvadar’s decision to show each scene step-by-step revealed that every shot only achieved the final visual quality after a final pass was made by an animator working with video reference of the original scene, begging the questions as to why go to the bother of all the technicality when that process could be done from scratch with presumably similar results.

If absolute realism in games still is your thing, then you may wish to investigate the work of George Borshukov at EA and his Universal Capture (UCap) method. Proven in The Matrix trilogy and Tiger Woods tech demos this really is something to watch, especially since its optimisation for real-time implementation.

Pixar: How Pixar Animation Studios Brings Characters To Life

Andy Schmidt – Animator on Ratatouille

This was an incredibly valuable lesson in the workflow for polishing an animated feature, which has some lessons we can directly employ for our own peer-review processes. The initially self-deprecating yet entertaining Andy Schmidt took us through the challenges of creating the characters for Ratatouille, (namely, how to turn vermin into an appealing character) before moving on to Pixar’s general approach to taking a scene through various levels of polish.

The biggest element of the talk that struck me was the difference between an animated film and videogame cutscene schedule – two supposedly similar projects in concept, with the key being when voice-over is recorded. Below is a comparison between Pixar and what is my experience of the norm for large-scale videogame project storytelling, taking a direct comparison with only the elements shared across mediums.

Pixar Animated Features – Videogame Cutscenes

Story Story
Script Lighting (Often unchanged from the level’s default)
Voice-Acting Storyboard
Storyboard Animatic
Pre-viz (Character placement, Cameras) Script
Animation Blocking Voice-Acting (Temporary in-house VO)
Animation Polishing Animation Blocking
Add Simulations (Skin, Cloth, Hair etc.) Voice-Acting
Add VFX Animation Polishing
Lighting Add VFX

Additionally, the four VO and Animation segments in the videogame timeline often contain a loop as the VO is reworked due to the script often being in flux – this unnatural workflow is every bit a by-product of not locking down the script early in the project, which is something our industry really needs to take strive towards.

Notes on Pixar character development:

• Each character was given a signature movement style to differentiate themselves from one another, this is something that would be great to explore with a game containing only a few diverse characters, as game animation is often diluted to facilitate sharing among multiple characters.
• Much research was undertaken on both rats and the cooking world, with the team joining a local cooking course and live rats brought in to the studio and hooked up to a web-cam. This unfortunately offered nothing more than lots of footage of sleeping rats, so old favourite the BBC Motion Library proved invaluable for rat movement.
• Among the many character-development sketches on show were what Andy called “Mechanical Sketches”, where the artist would envision how the skeleton rig might be placed inside the characters – something that is clearly considered at every stage of the process.
• Extremely finished paintings were created over the top of in-progress models to provide early lighting/material tests.
• Pose character sheets were devised to illustrate various correct-vs-incorrect methods for animating the characters – essentially style sheets setting a brand bible for each character.
• A decision made late in the character-development process to begin the movie with the rat characters walking on all fours necessitated a complete rebuilding of the character rig to allow optimum animation for both biped and quadruped motion.

Notes on Pixar rig development:

• As soon as the first rigs are created, vast amounts of animation tests are performed to try and break them when pushing characters to extremes. Similarly, facial rigs are run through calisthenics animations to push the expressions as far as they can go. At this stage, many character-defining walkcycles are also prototyped. Of interest, the walkcycles were completely symmetrical, pointing towards Pixar having a tool or method to quickly facilitate this.
• The animators work closely with the riggers and modeling department during the creation process. At the self-declared risk of sounding arrogant, Andy described the animators at Pixar as being the “vehicle” for telling the story, so modelers etc. bend over backwards to support them.
• One example of communicating change requests to modelers involved notes drawn over screenshots to illustrate the exact changes and improvements required.
• Animation tests would be created to test the reach of each character, therefore defining how some scenes might play out. The example shown highlighted a rather large chef’s inability to move in close to the kitchen-top, therefore necessitating additional collision deformation on his body.
• Similar tests are performed to find how far cloth and other dynamic elements of a character’s person could be pushed. It was interesting to note that by this stage the models were already fully complete in design.

Notes on Pixar animation style:

• Squash & Stretch is an integral part of their animation style.
• Many Pixar animators come from a 2D only background, including the speaker, as animation is seen as interchangeable between mediums. In my own experience, hiring good animators without any 3D experience has always proved fruitful, undermining perceived difficulties within own industry of hiring animators that have experience in Maya over Max and vice versa.
• Andy strongly recommended Ed Hooks book, “Acting for Animators”. Attendeding one of his lectures I also found it to be quite insightful, basing much of his observation on a character’s centre of mass defining his movements, as well as useful ideas concerning what goes on outside of a scene you are animating determining what plays out inside it.
• Andy went back to basics and displayed some inspiring examples of bouncing balls he’d found on the web. Noting that John Travlota begins every new character by creating a unique walk for him, Andy moved on to various walkcycles of his own creation, moving from realistic to highly stylized to illustrate how to promote caricature.
• Next, he showed a selection of admittedly rough though long character tests created to explore how characters might hold kitchen objects based on video research. These long tests would later prove useable for background characters in the final movie.
• Facial tests were also performed by matching frame-for-frame against movie clips of actors used as inspiration for the creation of the Pixar characters.
• Finally, “Lineups”, where all the major characters were lined up side by side performing actions in a brief scene, were created to explore consistency.

Notes on Pixar review process:

• Shots are divided out among animators almost like a casting process depending upon their particular strengths, such as humour, timing, caricature etc.
• Peer review is paramount, where showing in-progress shots for advice from the rest of the team is consistent in “Dailies” meetings, though it was not clear if this was mandatory. This is something essential to maintain, (and increase), quality among any group of animators, though a weekly assembly should suffice.
• The Director, in this case Brad Bird, uses a laser-pointer to highlight areas for work on the projector screen, though a video showed him to be incredibly animated when illustrating his comments – despite appearing to micro-manage the acting.
• A lot of, (but not all), Pixar animators shoot their own animation reference – this is sometimes sped up to fit better with the cartoony style.
• Their test renders for review, just like the Halon ones, were done with black bars at the top and bottom containing information such as the filename, version number, date, frame numbers, camera info and state, eg. blocking, polishing etc.
• In summary, it appeared the motto was to rework, rework and rework again to achieve the levels of quality Pixar is known for.

Finally, while most videogames unfortunately still rely on text and exposition, Andy finished his talk with an educational section stating that “Theatrics” should be used to tell a story without the viewer noticing, breaking this into the following insights.

• “You can say a lot with key-posing”: Mentioning storytelling poses, Andy informed us that you can really nail a scene in one pose. This is best illustrated in paintings, but he also showed some extreme poses from sports press that really showed more motion than many animated sequences. He advised to “sneak extreme poses” into animations to really sell a movement, using a scene from The Jungle Book as an example where Mowgli’s head is literally buried in his ass when climbing a tree. I myself have noticed rig-destroying examples like this being used to great effect in the Dead or Alive series of games to really accentuate attack motions.
• “Playing an action until something happens”: A simple observation to never have characters idle without at least something appearing to be going on in their heads – something not easily avoidable in videogames unfortunately.
• “What’s happening vs what’s really happening”: Basically, what is the scene really about? This idea centres around layered character motivation affording a vehicle for more interesting dynamic between characters where secret motivations allow acting on two levels – that of what the other characters know and of what the audience knows.
• “What does your character want? What do they do to get it?”: Another motivational observation, though this time a more general rule about character actions defined by their needs and what they do to achieve them.
• “What happens to your character isn’t as important as what you feel about it”: Essentially a separation of the events playing out around your character and how they choose to react, allowing the story to focus more on the characters themselves rather than what events take place for a deeper more human storytelling experience.