Creating game cinematics

Often artists will meet with game developers and spend time getting an understanding of the aim of the cut-scenes or trailer, pouring over concept art storylines and even the engine itself, taking note of anything that gives a strong indication of art direction and theme. From this, concept drawings are whipped up and placed into a ‘storyboard’ – a collection of rough sketches highlighting major points in the rendered film. These storyboards aren’t the kind of stuff you could stick glass over and hang in your lounge room; we’re talking extremely basic stick figures in a cartoon style, just enough to give an impression back to the client of where the artists think the clip should head. Nothing is in three dimensions yet, just loose ideas; the beginning of the road.



When CGI first leaps off paper and onto the screen it’s using ‘proxy’ objects, crude models of the final work. This phase is about extending the rough storyboard into the 3D world, but is still bereft of any detail. While the opening sequence of the Fury trailer might be a toned and supple female warrior running between towering ancient pillars, the proxy scene will be a coarsely rendered human figure, without textures, mapping or animation, ‘floating’ on a path through a mock environment.



The artists at Act3 perform even this elementary work on PCs that could eat a high end gaming rig for breakfast and still have room for pancakes. Each work system houses a monster Core 2 QX6850, Geforce 8800 Ultra 768MB GPU and a whopping 8GB of PC-6400 RAM, all designed to fuel 3D Studio Max for modeling/rendering. Just try and tell us they don’t play Crysis after work.

Proxy animations and models afford artists the chance to play with camera angles, shot layouts and re-render scenes using a minimum of processing power and – more importantly – time. Without complex textures, lighting and special effects, the entire CGI sequence can be manipulated and re-rendered in a fraction of the time it would take the final production.