Click here to view the embedded video.

I’d recommend this over any other engine for those wanting to break into the industry right now as it’s fast becoming a standard across many studios and any level of knowledge of its various animation-related systems like Matinee, Kismet, FaceFX and the AnimSet and AnimTree editors would certainly be a boost at the entry level. Nowadays I’m seeing Unreal3 experience on CV’s alongside traditional software like Max and Maya, so get downloading and start tinkering away…

When I first began animating games at home in my highschool years and was invited up to the local game studio, DMA Design, back home in Scotland it was exacly at the time of the big shift from the 2D of the 16bit consoles (SNES and Genesis) to the impending 3D revolution of the as-yet unrealeased PlayStation and N64. I still clearly recall being informed by my tour guide (Art Director Oz, who by some strange twist of fate now works just up the road from me in Montreal at local studo A2M) that it would be “a long time before we’ll be seeing round edges in games again” with the move to hard-edged low-poly games like the original Tomb Raider and Tekken. As such, I promptly ditched my computer and all my 2D skills and instead decided to apply for art college to get drunk and meet girls.

On completing my studies and joining the industry proper it was 5 years later and the old-hands I learned from and I were wrapping our heads around the leap from the original PlayStation to the PlayStation 2, with its analogue input and superior power and memory specifications. During this period a lot of over-estimation of these specs on our part resulted in much trial and error, (with the latter being most prevalent), and the unfortunately disproportionate ratio of actual creative-to-technical work was quite the learning experience. But hey, I didn’t know any better…

4 years later and I make the jump across the Atlantic. After a brief stint with the Xbox, it’s on to the Xbox360 (at the time, known as Xenon) and the then unfinished Unreal 3 engine. Again, lots of over-estimation of hardware specifications despite being some of the first developers to receive the new hardware kits and being the UE3 early-adopters. Again, having to relearn how to create animation in games from scratch as we apply new methods such as blending, additive animation, IK and an entirely new facial system, not to mention the poor artists who had to completely rethink their workflows with the move to normal maps and Z-brush modelling.

So here we are once more. 5 years later and on the verge of when another hardware generation cycle is expected to be announced, so I’m going to put it like this…

Can you imagine how crippled the art of filmmaking would be if every time shooting starts the vast majority of the crew’s time is spent creating reels of film and re-designing how it works inside the camera? If every time an author sits down to work on his or her next bestseller they must first spend years establishing workflows for simply getting the words down on the page? And every new album is delayed months as your favourite band is holed up in the studio, luthering their own guitars?

For the first time ever I’m coming into work and purely creating art. Not worrying about whether I’ll get the tech in time to finish the workload. Not dealing with crashes, bugs, delays and instead just knowing that when I want something to work, it does. For the first time in my career I’m spending 100% of my day creating mature, thought-provoking content, and it’s really something of a marvel to be discussing character motivation and story arcs safe in the knowledge that everything else is taken care of.

To this end you can keep your new hardware and your fancy camera inputs and magic wands, because I’m concenrating on content.

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.

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”.