Eye of the Storm: Blizzard's Cinematics Team

The tech behind the art
There is always a level of engineering behind the artistry, depending on how hard the team needs to push their hardware to achieve a result on screen. Thankfully, a lot of physics engines and dynamic animation systems are now available 'off the shelf' for Blizzard, but back in the day they would have built such effects by hand.

"A long time ago before fluid sims were something you could just buy, we knew we wanted to do a fluid sim in the Warcraft 3 cinematic. The one where Archimonde creates this city on his hand and then destroys it. At the time it was one guy who created an entire fluid simulator for that."

"Whatever the project needs - if it's fluid or water sims, or smoke and stuff like that - generally there are lots of packages we will evaluate and see which is best for our needs. It saves time and money that way."

So now the engineering is focused on techniques, and a recent move to Renderman has pushed a lot of internal R&D toward supporting that.

"Prior to that we used Max and Brazil for our rendering. Brazil is pretty much 'you get what you get', it's pretty easy to use, and other than a RAM limit it is pretty good. But we found when we got to making the cinematic for the Starcraft 2 teaser we ended up hitting that RAM limit quite often. So we knew we needed to look into other areas to render."

In a shoot out between Renderman and Mental Ray, Blizzard went with Renderman.

"Although its a much bigger thing to take on, it was a lot more versatile and would be better in the long run. So over the last two years we've purchased Renderman and just been developing tools and shaders and everything to really support it. And we really feel like we're just starting to get our grasp in the Renderman world. We hope that in the future we'll get better and better at it."

Hi, my name is Matte
It's not all about polygons and models when creating a cinematic. Sometimes the best solution is to take an artist and paint a wall.

"If you have a character and there is just a ton of dust blowing around, then you'll need to model out a lot of the environment because the dust will have to interact. But if its just a character standing in an area where there isn't that much environment going on then really you can get away with wherever shadows might hit or close proximity to the character's interaction."

"You can trick the eye quite a bit by getting some low poly geometry in there and then painting all the light into it. That way you don't have to light it and it is still 3D geometry so it parallaxes properly, but you're not spending a lot of time modeling and texturing the surfaces. If it's far enough in the background you just paint it on a flat plane like they did in old school Star Wars movies."

For a good example, go watch the Wrath of the Lich King video. There's a shot early on that's like a helicopter panning around a waterfall type environment. The entire environment is a matte painting.

"It still parallaxes very well, we just do it by getting low poly geometry in there that is spinning just right then paint all the texture and detail onto it."