Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Shot Breakdown

Below is a breakdown of what I was responsible for in each scene. The terms used are as follows:

Animatic

Initial layout of the scene, covering loose camerawork and editing as well as rough posing on the characters to be used as reference for the mocap shoot.

Mocap

Once mocap is received, laying it down and re-editing the timing and cinematography to match, including an initial pass on facial. Often a lot of artistic changes are made at this stage so this forms the bulk of the work.

Polish

The final stage where the VO, facial and all the details such as fingers and contact points are finalised.

Cutscenes are a divisive subject amongst videogame developers. We rely on them as a relatively production-safe solution for imparting exposition and story progression, to give the player objective location information, and to reward achievement and successes like level completion. However, they cut more than just the camera. The flow, immersion, and most of all, interactivity uniquely enjoyed by the medium of videogames all take a hit for their (often unskippable) duration.

In their defense however, attempts to forego their inclusion can result in a weaker visual presentation and take us further away from an emotional connection with characters and story. Additionally, a quick scan of screenshots previewing upcoming games illustrates our growing reluctance as an industry to present titles from the in-game perspective, where cameras are rightly skewed towards gameplay.

This talk explores various techniques used by games over the years to create a cinematic look outside of the traditional reliance on cutscenes, with the pros and cons of each, finishing with suggestions on how these might be combined in the future to offer cinematic moments while keeping the player in the game.

Takeaway: Techniques alternative to cutscenes for imparting interactive story and cinematic moments in games.

Intended Audience: Game Designers, Writers, Animators and those involved in storytelling.

Should you be attending the conference please stop by at 2.45 on Monday afternoon. If at least one of my observations is taken onboard then we might just reduce our reliance on cutscenes for storytelling.

[via Kotaku]

Feelplus: Looking Back at LOST ODYSSEY – The Challenge of Cross Cultural Development

Ray Nakazato – President, Feelplus Inc.

As with each of the Japanese presentations, Nakazato began by detailing the hierarchy of the companies involved in the project. Feelplus Inc. was established in 2005, with the team quickly growing in size to the final headcount of around 100 developers, many of which came from Microsoft and SEGA. Feelplus is 1 of 3 companies under the AQ Interactive Group, (including Artoon and Cavia), and the project was a collaborative effort with Sakaguchi’s team at Mistwalker who formed the core desgin team.

Of interest, Feelplus found difficulty in hiring staff under the Microsoft banner. One imagines that much of the staff was populated with juniors as a result, as can happen here in the west when attempting to ramp up into production quickly. The total timeline for the project was given as:

• 8 months to prototype
• 11 months to achieve First Playable stage
• 8 months to reach Alpha

This is an incredibly short time for an RPG of Lost Odyssey’s scale despite the 100-man team size and is testament to the efficiency of their working practices. Their engine of choice was Unreal3, which may have expedited some of the risk associated with building a brand new studio but I know only too well how difficult it is to shoehorn an RPG and all the unique systems it requires into an engine built primarily for shooting games. As such, their experience was all-too-familiar, with integrations of new engine builds often holding up production, taking 3 people 6 weeks for each integration.

Nevertheless, the in-game animation production actually went quite well:

In-game Animation:

• At peak production, there were 20 ingame animators, with Animation falling under the charge of the Art Directors.
• A “Setup Group” was employed to integrate animations into the game.
• Characters and creatures were done on time.

However, the cutscene production provided several challenges due to the sheer quantity and variable quality as a direct result:

Cutscenes – What went right:

• The cutscene Visual Director came from the movie industry, bringing with him a wealth of experience.
• Facial expressions were keyframe-animated as the automated method (presumably via the Unreal-integrated FaceFX) proved too low quality. Nakazato was especially proud of the pupil movement.
• Events were of high story-written quality.

Cutscenes – What went wrong:

• Battle, Adventure and Cutscene systems and scenarios were developed seperately.
• Too much time was spent creating locations that were passed through swiftly, therefore negating the effort put into them.
• Over 300 cutscenes were required, with 4 different quality levels:
  1. FMV (Full Motion Video) Event – Pre-rendered cinematics.
  2. A Event – In-game, with keyframed facial animation and specifically recorder Motion-Capture.
  3. B Event – Off-the-shelf mocap.
  4. Scripted Events – Purely in-game.

• Looking back, FMV and A Events used same assets, so there was an unusual inconsistency despite using all the same models.
• Users were confused over inconsistent quality as they were not aware of what was an A or B in-game cutscene.

I’m sure many players are aware of the visual disparity when mixing up pre-rendered and in-game cinematic cutscenes. Even if they use the exact same models the difference in lighting, texture resolution or even full-screen effects like motion-blur become immediately apparent. It cannot be denied though that pre-rendered cinematics, by their very pre-made nature, are much more stable and easy to integrate into a game. Not much can go wrong with simply playing a video, plus you can render out at a much lower framerate and therefore throw in more characters and visual effects into a single scene that would otherwise slow down the engine, but something like visually customisable characters can prohibit their use entirely.

Nakazato said of this incosistency, “So we did two different methods, but we ended up that the players didn’t know which one is A event and which one is B event, so they just felt that the quality of the entire movies are inconsistent. That’s what we are regretting at this point.” However it’s not all bad, with the game’s opening sporting one of the most seamless transistions from pre-rendered cutscene to in-game action since Final Fantasy VII and the original Abe’s Odyssey, which you can see below – (skip to around the 3-minute mark if you’re the impatient type).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Representatives from Disney, Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic and several high-profile game development studios were in town to share work methods and techniques, for which I am all-ears, with the week ending on a high at the Halo 3 party, whereby I was fortunate enough to come home with a second copy of the game after beating a handful of Ubisoft animators into Slayer submission.

Over the next week I’ll be uploading my notes from the various lectures attended, (in no particular order), beginning with Bungie’s own Feature Presentation below:

Bungie: Creating Movie-Quality Cinematic Moments In Realtime

CJ Cowan & James McQuillan – Lead Producer and Cinematic Director on Halo 3

This talk was unfortunately beset with technical problems throughout, and as such many of the real-time editing features of their engine were unable to be demonstrated. It did, however, offer an insight into a company creating one of the most epic games ever with tools that were so technologically backwards it is amazing they managed to get anything out the door at all.

Despite this, they appeared oblivious to how outdated their systems on show were as they proudly demonstrated tools and processes that I’ve fortunately never had to endure in all my time in this industry. Perhaps Bungie is living in a bubble-shield?

Notes:

• Around 150 full-time employees on Halo 3.
• The original E3 announcement trailer was put together by a small team consisting of only a Cinematic Lead, an Art Director, a modeler and 2 Animators, and took around 3 months to complete the three minute cinematic. For the full game, they required over 45 minutes of cinematics to be created in just 4 months.
• To that end, they had to revise their cinematic tool. The original implementation (used for the E3 trailer) was incredibly outdated, requiring a script to be created to sequence the shots, add audio and play animations etc. Their update wasn’t much better, with a complex Maya tool, the “Cinematic Toolbox” or “Uber Panel” created to generate the same script via buttons and dropdown menus with not a timeline in sight.
• One feature that did sound interesting though was the ability to loop a chosen shot in the XBOX360, and editing would be updated in real-time on every export.
• Via a “one-button exporter”, the tool exported cutscenes in around 45 seconds on Halo 3, whereas the same scene would take several hours on Halo 2.
• They went into some detail on the outsourcing workflow used to overcome the time constraints, employing 36 animators from 3 external teams, many of which were subcontractors working here in Montreal. The workflow was as follows:

1. Storyboards created
2. Animatic created in Premiere
3. Audio/Dialogue recorded
4. Layout scene in Maya
5. Some animation blocked in
6. 1st Pass (70% complete at this point)
7. 2nd Pass
8. Polish
9. Facial Animation (eyes & cheeks only – engine handles lip-sync)

• For outsourcing, the animatic was brought into the camera image-plane to use as reference for setting up the shots. The animators were then given the maya scene once camera moves and some basic animation was laid out by the Cinematic Director.
• Once outsourced animation was received, Bungie would respond with comments within 24-48 hours. They were at pains to stress that only one voice would critique the animation to avoid mixed messages, which sounds like a good idea.
• On average the outsourcers were creating around 6 minutes of animation per day.
• Amazingly, ingame characters in Halo 3 can require between 2000-3000 animations.
• They will be using the same engine for upcoming projects, which has been iterated on since the original Halo.
• Bungie strived to not have anything pre-rendered. Even in-game video screens are rendering images in real-time. Playing the game, I’ve noticed that they use a lot of matte-paintings for backdrops on particular shots – something I’m keen to adopt.

The talk picked up towards the end when demonstrating the ”Save Films” feature’s ability to replay any play-through stored on the XBOX. Pausing the game and flying around received a rapturous applause from the audience when displaying some of the more impressive VFX, (unsurprising really when most of the audience consisted of people from the VFX industry).Regarding the remainder of the talk:

• There are 3500 lines of dialogue in Halo 3 – lots of the story is given over the radio and heard from other NPCs.
• There was only one VFX artist on Halo 3, quite an impressive feat given the effects-heavy nature of the game.
• 2.5 hours of “Save Film” recorded data only takes up 3Mb of data on the XBOX360 hard drive.
• Responding to questions from the audience, the Save Films feature does highlight errors in the game that might otherwise be glossed over during actual play, but they decided it was so cool they didn’t want to cut it.
• As a result of requests from the machinima community, members of which they often invited to the studio to advise them on what they’d like to see in Halo 3, features were added such as the ability to turn off dialogue during cutscenes to allow overdubbing.
• When questioned what Master Chief looks like under his helmet, the speaker answered “He looks like Bill Hicks”.