Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/10832
n n n n Gaming grammers, who worked in little pods, enabling them to get things done quicker and more ef- ficiently than if they had kept the departments separate. “Many ideas came from random conversations while getting coffee or just by standing in a person’s cubicle,” he notes. After an idea was initiated, “we quickly prototyped and tested it in-game to see if it is actually any fun. If we saw the potential, then we would go through the motions of getting an anima- tion from blocking, all the way through to final. Being able to quickly iterate and see the animations in-game is key. An anima- tion is not final until all the little bells and whistles—blends, rumbles, shakes, and VFX treatments—are added.” While working in those pods, each anima- tor was able to explore his or her own prefer- ences for a particular character. Sacramento, for instance, started by looking at reference from games, movies, YouTube, or even film clips he took of himself performing vari- ous movements. “Acting out your animation gives you a better sense of how the animation should feel and where the weight and force is coming from,” he adds. Nine Circles Te environments, like the characters that inhabit them, have a unique theme and are reflective of the sin associated with that par- ticular Circle of Hell; these are in addition to three smaller levels used in the lead-in to the game. In Lust, the architecture contains sexu- ally suggestive forms; in Gluttony, the land- scape resembles the internal organs of a crea- ture. As a result of their specificity, very few of the environments could be reused, creating a tremendous amount of work for the environ- mental artists. Because Inferno runs at 60 frames per sec- ond (nearly double the average), there was not much wiggle room when building the environs, particularly when there was more combat than usual (which created the added expense of the associated effects). According to Holden, there were times when the budgets ran over, requiring the group to strip down the environments to free up clock cycles for extra characters or combat elements. “Strangely, one of the smallest levels caused the biggest headaches,” says Holden. Te Phle- gyas Rampage level, wherein the player controls normal map this way,” says Holden. “We did the writhing bodies in the wall-climb, fluids, and more with this system.” In Kuiper’s opinion, the area within the circle of Anger presented the effects team with some of the biggest issues. Te environment is wind-torn, the sky boiling, and lava and steam boil from below, while at the same time, Phle- gyas smashes the arena and blasts Dante with fire attacks—while other enemies descend at the same time. “During all that, Dante can do any number of VFX-intensive magical at- tacks,” he says. “Balancing high-quality VFX with performance was more difficult on this game than any other I’ve worked on.” Firelight Inferno had two lighting leads: Matt Christ- mann, who focused on technical issues, such as tool scripting and support, feature requests, and testing; and Rachel Cross, who focused on artis- tic and production issues, such as artist collabo- ration and mentoring, tracking, and communi- cation. However, as art director, Huang set the color script for the title and reviewed the light- ing progress throughout to ensure consistency Te most difficult animations were the full-on cinematic QuickTime events (QTE), which consist of the player character, an en- emy character or two, some weapons, a few cameras, and likely a piece of the environ- ment. “Tese animations tend to be on the lengthy side,” Sacramento points out. “Con- sidering that an average attack animation is roughly 45 frames for a single character, these QTEs can range from 500 to 1000 frames for all the components.” Moreover, these se- quences usually include two to four branch points where the player can succeed or fail, and the failures have to be animated separate- ly for each branch. “Managing all these parts of the sequence can be daunting,” Sacramento adds. “Yet, these are most likely the highly memorable moments in the game.” 26 May 2010 A character’s aesthetic reflects the sin associated with a particular Circle of Hell wherein the charac- ter can be found, including Anger (left) and Gluttony (right). the giant demon, gave the group “fits” with the frame rate and caused a lot of rework. “Te level was simple enough,” he notes, “but the fact that Phlegyas walked through the environment de- stroying buildings with a breath weapon and his fists generated a huge number of particles, which ate up frame time like crazy. We had to use the simplest environmental shaders to get it to work and be as exciting as we had envisioned.” To facilitate the environment creation pro- cess, the team, led by Rich Larm, devised a sys- tem to render textures in-game at 60 fps with the studio’s particle system. Tey were created in an off-screen buffer and then used with any material for environments as well as charac- ters, visual effects, and so forth. “You can get an animated but infinitely variable texture and across all the levels since different lighters often handled adjacent rooms. Associate art director Meagan Carabetta provided lighting concepts for each zone, painting over unlit screenshots to provide a snapshot of the final look of the game. Tis gave production a clear picture of what the end result should look like so that no time was wasted on unwanted work. Te team used a number of lighting tech- niques, including occlusion, which was baked in using Maya’s Mental Ray (from Mental Images). In addition, the crew used direct and indirect il- lumination using Illuminate Labs’ Turtle, bak- ing most of the environmental geometry light into the vertex colors. At runtime, dynamic lights were used, and according to Christmann, each mesh could be affected by as many as eight