Chrishanel.psd

This was in 2012, about two full years before WildStar was released. The cinematics department didn't exist yet. I had been working there as a content designer for the last 18 months, doing standard PVE questlines and leveling content.

The game *had* cutscenes, but not many yet -- and most existed because a content designer REALLY wanted one and used what system there was to make it work themselves.

But the game had such great animation and character, and the lead devs agreed we should show that off as much as possible. But to do it right would mean devoting real resources internally to make it happen.

Why? Well, if you were to take a bunch of game assets and throw them in another 3D program, you would spend SO MUCH EFFORT to try and make it feel like it was the same in-game world. And you would likely fail.

There are a lot of examples of game trailers where you can immediately tell that the video has zero connection to how the actual game looks, feels, and moves. Everybody wanted to avoid that, but that meant that these projects would be dev-driven.

And so, the cinematics department was born to develop better methods for creating in-game cutscenes, and as a byproduct, be able to produce marketing content that actually came out of the game engine, animated by the same devs who worked on the game.

Seth Kendall was the first member of the team, and I was the second. Seth found out from someone that before being a designer, I'd been a filmmaker and visual effects guy. He pitched me on the project, and a week later, I was moved.

Early on, our methods for creating renders were goofy, because at all times we were fighting against the game- because we needed it to complete a task it wasn't really built for.

Hero animations were captured by loading a custom 'world' in-game, running a script to trigger all the moving parts, and then screen-capturing the display. You know, very state of the art!

Some captures took dozens of attempts. There wasn't anything about the game that could guarantee that every animating object would be in sync. We could lose framerate in the Fraps recording. It was extremely trial and error.

I think this took me 80 tries to properly capture. Fraps could drop frames, the game could stop running at 60fps, the secondary characters could bow/salute/run at the wrong time, or the laser blast could fail to render because the brightest point would be IN BETWEEN FRAMES.

We worked with engineers to get it so we could spin up a dev server, open a custom world, run the script that spawns everything, and then the game would pause, spit out a screenshot, move forward in game time 1/60th of a second, screenshot, and repeat.

The most exciting thing for me happened during a discussion with Loren McQuade, who was one of Carbine's founders and an incredibly smart engineer. He was responsible for a large amount of the game's graphics, so naturally we were talking to him a lot.

Loren was using a debug mode to test the game rendering that used a hotkey to change what the game was rendering. There were a dozen or so options, and they would seem extremely bizarre if you didn't have the proper context.

One was simply a depth map. One was unlit diffuse colors. One was a simple binary background/foreground B&W image. You know... a lot of the render passes you'd do use in After Effects to build a multi-pass render in a traditional pipeline!

All I needed was one tweak: I asked Loren if he and his team could make it so that if you were using these render modes, it would give the screenshot an alpha channel. Once that was added, we could get everything we wanted out of the game and into a proper post process.

So now, I would edit the cinematic script to only render a single element of the shot at a time, and then capture all the render passes I needed for it, usually 6-8 versions. This added up to a LOT of frames. Eventually, I wrote a tool in LUA to automate it.

I also wrote a suite of tools to help with doing machinima capture. I called it Caboose, in honor of Red Vs. Blue. It did creature spawning, animation management, camera flying tools, set dressing, display settings, the works.

I got beat out by @StephanFrost for the narration job, something I was bitter about for the exact amount of time it took to see the end result of the first episode and realize I was being a huge dumb. I settled for the role of "Disclaimer Guy" and created my own brand of fun.

Oh man, I totally forgot about that aspect of it and now it's all flooding backhttps://twitter.com/itsnonbb/status/1037951634192576512 …