Eye of the Storm: Blizzard's Cinematics Team

Lighting: the cinematic secret sauce
You might need your models and environments to be first rate, but the final product really comes together through the lighting.

"Lighting is actually a very complex part of it and we keep trying to work out how to speed it up. That's what defines the quality of the image, I think."

In Chamberlain's early days at Blizzard, they took a hit and hope approach to lighting their scenes, but you can't get away with taking light too lightly anymore.

"If you go back and watch our old stuff, in my opinion it looks very dated now. Since the public's eye has been refined we have to be really careful about what we can get away with. As a result we've set up systems that make sure everybody has similar light angles and similar light colours per shot."

A recent development to help speed up an otherwise slow lighting workflow is a render pass that separates each light channel in the image for compositing. This allows the lighting intensity and colour to be adjusted in compositing instead of having to go back and re-render any changes.

True colours shining through
Anyone who plays through a through levels of a Blizzard title, or a few zones of World of Warcraft, quickly picks up on Blizzard's distinct use of colour. And Chamberlain agrees this is something they take very seriously, with "more time than you'd imagine" put into defining their colour palettes for a game, chasing "that perfect look" with a lot of work in compositing.

"I feel like we're always trying to push hue and saturation a little bit further than what you'd see in real life or what you'd see in any top film. I think that contributes to what the 'Blizzard look' is. We always try to find something that is a little bit more colourful so that it matches the game, because most of our games are pretty colourful. But we want to keep it in the realm of tasteful, but still more colourful than a desaturated cel would be."

Colour may play one key role in giving Blizzard their special something, but Chamberlain is keen to emphasise how the passion within the team helps them really take their work to another level.

"We're not trying to satisfy someone else, and we're very married to these ideas and stories. We all live and breathe these stories Blizzard writes, and it is great to be amongst a team where every single person in it is really passionate about what we're doing because we're all heavily invested in it."

"I'd like to think that comes out in the final image. It's a great situation for us to be in and we're very thankful for that because it really comes down to a bunch of guys getting together and making something that they think is really, really cool and then releasing it to the world and hoping they think it is cool, too."

In case you're wondering, Blizzard, we do agree - it is really, really cool.