Animation for videogames: roundtable: next-generation platforms are affecting the way today's videogames are designed and animated

Post, May, 2005 by Ann Fisher

TIM MILLER

Co-founder/creative director, Blur Studios

(www.blur.com), LA

Current project/platform: Cinematics for Hellgate: London for Flagship Studios (3.5-minute teaser, plus part of the PR campaign, tentative release 12/06; Aeon Flux for Terminal Reality (teaser and models that will be used for in-engine game characters, tentative release 11/05); Company of Heroes for Relic Entertainment (tentative release 3/06); all next gen.

In addition to cinematics, Blur creates full CG animation for large format ride films, independent feature films and spots.

How are next-gen platforms changing the way you work?

"We just did a project for EA [Electronic Arts] where the game is still a couple of years out and they know it's going to be done on the Far Cry engine, and they know what they're going to be capable of doing in a few years. So they came to us and said, 'We want you to do a cinematic for us, here's the story, we want it to look like it's in-game and we want you to make it as good as you can make it, and that will be the bar that we will aspire to hit, in-engine, in realtime, a year and a half from now.' That's happening more and more. But by the same token, it's not like they're [those outside the game industry] not doing amazing stuff. We're starting to use a lot more normal mapping in our pre-rendered stuff as well. The learning experience goes back and forth."

What's the most important element in your games?

"It's the story ... that's what people want us to do, although different people have different goals. Now we're doing two cinematics for Company of Heroes. One of the cinematics--its basically Saving Private Ryan--is the first wave of the assault on Omaha Beach. Our cinematic plays, everybody gets killed and then you cut back. It starts in one of the landing boats and you follow it all the way through. This character gets killed and then it goes back out into the water and you see all the dead bodies floating and then you see another boat coming in, which wipes the screen. During that wipe they transition to in-engine game play and you become the character right there and your job is to rally what's left of the troops on the beach that just got shot to hell and take the Germans out. It won't be a seamless transition visually because you'll definitely see a quality difference between what we did and what they did in-engine, although the in-engine stuff looks great. It looks better every year. I think this is a really cool way to get you into the game."

What's your most important tool?

"We're lucky in that most of the game community uses 3DS Max. It's not impossible if a company uses something different but it certainly makes it easier.

"We are running into a few walls, especially as the characters get more and more detailed and high rez. Max and Maya--the architecture's kind of creaky--have been around for awhile, whereas Softimage is much newer and Softimage seems to handle large databases more readily, so we're probably switching to Softimage on the front end for character animation and then we're going to stay with Max on the back end. I think the balance may shift. We're on the alpha team for Max so the balance will switch when Discreet [now Autodesk] comes out with their new version. Who knows? Every year I look at everything. We've been on Max for 10 years. It runs on dual IBM 3GB boxes, with Nvidia cards with 2GB of RAM."