"We are just making what we think is cool."
In a sense, that could be all you need to know about Blizzard and its industry leading Cinematics team. Jeff Chamberlain, Cinematic Project Lead (who names his work as Director of the luscious video you've seen around Wrath of the Lich King as his favourite), cuts to the chase quite well in his description of what Blizzard aims to achieve with the video sequences we'll usually watch a few hundred times with our jaws on our laps.
"The aim for the department is to tell the story further for the game. At Blizzard we think that story is pretty important for the game to be fun. Our job is to take portions of the game that are more important, or very punctual in the story, and develop them further in a more theatrical style rather than in the gameplay."
Being their own client, Chamberlain finds the team is able to work in a much more flexible and organic way than an outsourced team could deliver, running with their passion for the story instead of a client's briefing document. So they really do get to 'make what they think is cool' with changes following the needs of the story.
"If it ends up not being cool then we'll make it better," says Chamberlain.
Putting the band together
When Chamberlain was first involved (during work on Diablo 2) the Blizzard Cinematics team was just a dozen strong. Back then everyone did a bit of everything, but with expansion came specialisation. Now its a gathering of over 100 artists. Modelers, animators, finishers (the lighting and compositing artists), plus a team of concept and storyboard artists, as well as the editors. Then there is a team of techs, managing the tools the team needs to get the job done. The cinematics team operates separately from the rest of the Blizzard production line, but the directors and leads come together to share content and concepts.
"If they have concepts for a character we need to use, we get it from them. And vice versa. If we need to develop a character before they're ready to then we'll start concepting it and make sure it fits their needs as well. Then we share all those assets and we start from day one and create the best cinematic we can."
The life of a Blizzard CGI shot
Organic has a nice ring to it, but you still need a good workflow to get a polished product out the door. Chamberlain gives us a run down on how a shot passes from artist to artist as it moves from the napkin to final frames.
"When we decide we're going to make a game, the leads of the different departments get together and make sure we generate a story that fits. As far as cinematics goes we really need to get story very early on in the process, so we make sure we can establish at least the portions of the story that our cinematics are going to tell."
Days and even months of meetings can follow as they hammer out the story, and then the labour of love begins. Storyboards become animated storyboards (thanks to a storyboard team who are also trained animators) complete with temporary music to help set the tone and get the pacing right. Then the animators and modeling team get involved, creating a rough 3D version of the final animation.
While the modeling team works on characters and environments, the animators work with very low polygon characters and as the models are refined and updated the animations are refined. This is also where production technicians get involved, supporting the more technical developments like hair and skeletal systems for the characters. And then the effects team kicks into gear.
"Lighting will start developing the look dev by creating HDR maps for the environment so we can light with nice high range imagery. They'll start doing lighting tests, depth of field tests per shot. Then as animation and modelling get more complete, we'll hand that off to effects and the finishing team and they'll start applying all these things they've been testing out. Often it's half way there and we have to refine it much more at that point."
From there it's just a case of lather, rinse, and repeat until a sexed up final output is ready for action.
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."
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.
