Happy new year! May 2017 be better than the 2016 global disaster of shame and death!
The last 6 months or so I have worked on what I just call "The Hall Scene", on my project.
It is the first scene in the game, and workflows for the way I want to make the game had to be worked out in this scene, the reason I've spent much time on it.
However in the beginning of December I hit a road block and had to start over, and this is how it goes:
When the game was written the story required a game that was not made with a "toon" like style as seen in so many other games in this genre. The story had to be cinematic and portray facial closeups and a somber atmosphere. So I thought,; why not just make it like an interactive movie? I imagined handheld cameras, weird filming angles and tons of cool effects, and it seemed to work in the Hall scene. But it required lots of tweaking to get the render times down, and since the scene was so simple the real slap in the face came when I moved deeper into more complex scenes. The render times went through the roof (15 hours and more)! It simply was not feasable anymore.
So after a lot of thinking I came up with a more classic idea: Have more static cameras, and composite the 3d characters into the scene instead of rendering them with the scene.
The difference is not better but way faster, both when it comes to creating the scenes with more matte paintging and photos, and rendering it out. Also it is now possible to blend with real actors and video elements.
Keep in mind that the blurryness and abberation in the last image is how it is meant to be.
The last 6 months or so I have worked on what I just call "The Hall Scene", on my project.
It is the first scene in the game, and workflows for the way I want to make the game had to be worked out in this scene, the reason I've spent much time on it.
However in the beginning of December I hit a road block and had to start over, and this is how it goes:
When the game was written the story required a game that was not made with a "toon" like style as seen in so many other games in this genre. The story had to be cinematic and portray facial closeups and a somber atmosphere. So I thought,; why not just make it like an interactive movie? I imagined handheld cameras, weird filming angles and tons of cool effects, and it seemed to work in the Hall scene. But it required lots of tweaking to get the render times down, and since the scene was so simple the real slap in the face came when I moved deeper into more complex scenes. The render times went through the roof (15 hours and more)! It simply was not feasable anymore.
So after a lot of thinking I came up with a more classic idea: Have more static cameras, and composite the 3d characters into the scene instead of rendering them with the scene.
The difference is not better but way faster, both when it comes to creating the scenes with more matte paintging and photos, and rendering it out. Also it is now possible to blend with real actors and video elements.
Keep in mind that the blurryness and abberation in the last image is how it is meant to be.
This "original" scene is fully 3d, and very dark and dramatic, but since the camera moved in the animation, the background had to be rendered for each frame and that took a long time.
Render time: 3 hours
This "new" scene is much less dramatic, but also serve its purpose. This is made with a static camera, and is actually a composition of photo (which makes it faster to create) and 3d elements. It is not perfect, but that's not super imortant in the end.
Render time: 3 minutes