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MillimeterStep by Step: Warhammer
Nov 2, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
When Games Workshop, creator of the Warhammer franchise, wanted cinematics for its latest game, the company returned to Blur Studio in Venice, Calif., and asked the CG specialists there to outdo what they’d done in the past. “Today we have to deal with higher expectations from our clients,” says CG Supervisor Jerome Denjean, a six-year Blur veteran. “They want characters with long hair and cloth sims. The scope of game cinematics is now much more complex.”
What the new Warhammer required was the proverbial cast of thousands. “We had to show what the game is all about, which is about very large armies fighting,” Denjean says. For the opening shot, he says, “I was amazed by how many characters are in it.”
Games Workshop provided Blur with extensive concept art and basic character models. “[But] we did have to build a fair amount from scratch," Denjean says. "We had to build the whole environment and all the characters that you see fighting.”
That environment had both matte-painted and 3D-modeled elements. A large matte painting showing the sky and the distant environment was created in Adobe Photoshop. The 3D space in which the armies wage their battle extends pretty far into the distance, but Denjean says that fortunately the mass of characters covered this ground so it could be fairly simple. “There are a couple of hills but we didn’t have to put in grass or rocks,” he says.
The characters themselves had to be faithful to the game, and Blur received a range of game models from the client that were used to build the fighters. “We cleaned them up and added details, mostly in the surfaces so that they would shine a little more,” Denjean says.
Blur used Autodesk 3ds Max for modeling, and then the character models were exported to Softimage|XSI, where they were rigged and animated. “We’ve moved our rigging and animation pipeline to XSI in the past couple of years,” Denjean says. “It allows us more flexibility with rigging, and with updating rigs that we’re already animating.” (The characters would later be brought back into Max for lighting and rendering.)
Blur has amassed an extensive library of motion-captured animation cycles that was used as the basis for a diversity of battlefield characters. “That’s something we developed out of necessity to deal with crowds smartly,” Denjean says.
Still, he admits that the process could be maddening. “You spend three days offsetting all those little animations, and you still see 200 guys lifting their left arms at the same time," he says. "You may have thousands of characters, but if even three guys raise their arms together, you’ll see it. We spent a lot of time making sure that the animation didn’t look repetitive. Once we select a ground surface for a character, we could have the character and the animation pop up where we point and click. We have scripts that randomize the animation so that you don’t see loops and cycles. It was a more complicated than I thought it would be to get rid of those loops and cycles. What gives a frantic feeling to the whole piece is that whenever have two guys fighting, you also see other characters running or fighting in the background.”
Blur’s Remi McGill built a plug-in called Point Cache Planter that enabled Denjean’s team to build crowds very quickly once they had a library of soldiers and animations. “We could have a character like an orc fighting an elf,” Denjean says. “Then we could have an animation of an orc looking for a new foe, and have an elf running towards him and locking in combat. We could use those in groups.”
The hero characters in this Warhammer cinematic also featured flowing hair and simulated clothing. These multiple sims were run in 3ds Max, and hairfx—a Max plug-in—was used for all the hair. Blur also used Pixologic ZBrush to polish the look of the characters, and this represented a new development for the studio. “We’re now using [mental images] mental ray for final renders, and that allows us to take advantage of it," Denjean says. "This was our first big project using mental ray. We’ve been thinking about switching to it for awhile, and we figured if we survived Warhammer with mental ray, we could do anything. Ultimately it was worth it because of the visual quality. We could use ZBrush for characters, and it’s got more advanced lighting and motion blur technology, too.”
No battle scene would be complete without smoke, fire and other particle effects, and for these Blur employed a Max plug-in called Sitni Sati FumeFX. “It allowed us to do anything that has a kind of liquid motion," Denjean says. "We could render smoke and fire with it and calculate motion for some particles. We also used it a lot for ambient battle smoke.”
Compositing of all the elements in this battle scene was done with eyeon Software Fusion. Because Blur worked on Warhammer for the better part of a year, individual artists were able to take their assignments further through the pipeline than is typical. “We think the way to get the best work is to empower artists to handle complete characters as much as possible," Denjean says. "So our character modelers started from scratch and only stopped when they had a fully textured and shaded character. It was the same with environment modelers. One of the intangibles of this project is we could get away from that assembly-line feeling. And when you can do that, it always looks better.”
Credit Roll:
CG Supervisor: Jerome Denjean
Animation Supervisor: JD Fievet
Effects Supervisor: Brandon Riza
Creative Director: Tim Miller
Layout: Franck Balson, JD Fievet, David Nibbelin, Brian Whitmire
Lead Scene Assembler: Kris Kaufman
Modeling: Shaun Absher, Alessandro Baldasseroni, Luis Calero, Sze Jones,
James Ku, Alex Litchinko, Jason Martin, Laurent Pierlot, Olivier Vernay-Kim
Rigging: Steven Caron, Enoch Ihde, Michael Stieber
Animation Leads: Rini Sugianto, Brian Whitmire
Animation: Bryan Hillestad, Jeremiah Izzard, Nick Whitmire
Hair and Cloth Simulation: Becca Baldwin, Jon Jordan
Lighting and Compositing: Simon Blanc, Darren Butler,
Kris Kaufman, Greg Kegel, Laurent Pierlot, Olivier Vernay-Kim
Effects: Craig Brown, Ian Farnsworth, Seung Jae Lee, Andrew Melnychuk-Oseen, Mark Theriault, Brandon Young
Matte Painter: Jaime Jasso
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.