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”.