Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/6179
January 2010 22 n n n n Gaming Perfect Consonance To accomplish the daunting task of fully real- izing Cameron's blue-bathed, luridly painted alien biosphere in the interactive medium, Ubisoft began its collaboration with the direc- tor and the Weta crew in New Zealand, which was tasked with a great deal of the film's digital imagery, over two and a half years ago. "is is where the whole game and movie interface usu- ally breaks down," Cameron has said, "because movies are often on a one-year track scream- ing to the theater, and a year after, someone pushes the button on the game, and it's just not enough time to develop a game properly." Cameron has noted that he set out with Ubisoft to create the ideal model for how a game and a movie should be co-developed, with neither being the redheaded stepchild of the other. Under Cameron's model, produc- tion on the game began concurrently with that of the film. In addition, he has stated, "I pro- posed that the game should not be a slave to the movie, but should follow its own story line; it should be developed fully in parallel, so that they exist in the same world—using the same creatures and environments—and yet have its own story." Ubisoft rose to that challenge, cre- ating new characters, vehicles, and weapons, embellishing settings, even enhancing the way the Na'vi interact with creatures and plants, and obtain their powers and poisons. "As a result," Cameron has said, "the world of the Avatar game is considerably richer and more extensive than what you'll see in the film, and at the same time, it doesn't contain any spoilers that will ruin the movie experience for you, which allows us to put it on the street be- fore the film comes out. is is really the per- fect consonance between the two mediums." e bulkhead in Cameron's model for achieving this "perfect consonance" was ag- gressive asset sharing and two-way collabora- tion, in which both the film and game teams could develop and share designs and digital as- sets for each other's projects. "We received just about every type of reference we could from Lightstorm [Cameron's production compa- ny], from concept designs, characters, creature meshes, and mocap data, to early renders for animation reference," says Ubisoft artistic di- rector Pascal Blanche. Meanwhile, Ubisoft's artists—working behind double-locked doors and under high-security cameras and strict confidentiality clauses in their veritable bun- ker in downtown Montreal—designed every- thing from vehicles to costumes, even sounds, that Cameron eventually incorporated into his film, marking a watershed moment in film- game convergence. "We even received entire animatic sequenc- es of scenes depicted in the film," says Blanche. "Nevertheless, it's important to understand that for creating the game, they still served somewhat as references. e models needed to be able to work within our Dunia game engine, and within the tighter constraints that we're given (we don't yet have Weta-strength über computers, obviously). Even if the game industry gets close to the movie industry's pipeline, we still have technical obstacles to overcome that place certain demands on our models and textures, so we often had to re- build Weta's models based on the various film assets that we received." A Bioluminescent World Spike Tears. Cliff Slouchers. Stinger Ivy. ese are but a few of the alien plant species that in- habit the tropical wonderland of Pandora, all of which Cameron based on the strange bio- luminescent marine life he discovered while exploring the kelp forests and coral reefs of the deep sea. Modeled, rigged with bones and IK, and animated in Autodesk's 3ds Max, these plants are living, sentient beings that can coop- erate with the Na'vi or antagonize the humans. To re-create the plants for the game, Weta pro- vided Ubisoft with QuickTime turntables of the plant meshes used in the film, so the artists could analyze them from every point of view. "ey also gave us high-res textures from the film, which we used while painting the in-game shaders in Pixologic's Zbrush," says Blanche. At night, the plants luminesce, setting the forest alight like some neon Garden of Eden. To achieve this effect, Ubisoft developed spe- cial shaders in Zbrush that were then modified in the studio's Dunia game engine. e engine, which had been developed for Ubisoft's Far Cry 2, was heavily modified for Avatar to ac- commodate such effects and to expand its veg- etation technology. "Because the Dunia game engine is time-based, we had the opportunity to increase specific layers of glow values and textures in the shaders," says Blanche, "giving the whole bioluminescent effect an extraordi- nary natural, organic feel, depending on the time of day." Cameron, a firm believer that the devil is in (Top) Avatar: the Game features 16 rich, diverse environments teeming with exotic flowers and beasts. (Bottom) When a plant is injured in a firefight, the Dunia engine decreases the intensity of its glow shader to simulate its waning life.