Computer Graphics World

Gaming•Multimedia ■ ■ ■ ■ like to try something less violent and less dark than "Chadam," suggesting a sugary girl- focused story with music as one possible idea. e concept would be to show two diverse examples of how the development pipeline he's laying—on top of the UE3 foundation—can be implemented for any type of CG project. Hall is especially inter- ested in bridging the gap between linear and interactive entertainment. After all, he got his start developing fi rst-person shooters. Hall founded development studio Monolith in 1994, which went on to cre- ate games such as Shogo, No One Lives Forever, FEAR, and e Matrix Online. Seven months after Warner Bros. Interac- tive Entertainment (WBIE) hired Hall as its senior vice president in January 2004, WBIE purchased Monolith. During his tenure, Hall oversaw a number of game hits (FEAR, Batman Begins) and misses (Catwoman, Superman Returns). In Feb- ruary 2007, he left the executive world to seek out new creative opportunities at HDFilms. e story that Hall and his team are tell- ing through HDFilms focuses on the char- acter Chadam's battle against Viceroy, a serial killer who's out to destroy the world. e whole concept revolves around the use of the imagination and an overarching sto- ry about how someone's imagination can be so powerful that it can aff ect the lives of those around that person. Laying the Pipeline Hall has an in-house core team of eight people working on world construction for "Chadam." e art pipelines were designed similar to the way games are built today, ex- cept the team didn't have to be concerned with gameplay or frame rate. Instead, it's all about telling a story and pushing resolution. "Our goal wasn't to create the most real- istic, detailed world, but more on develop- ing a story," says Hall. "However, some of the sets built for 'Chadam' are pushing well over hundreds of thousand triangles, along with some textures at 4096x4096 pixels. Since our concerns were renders rather than frame rates, our limitations, as far as quality was concerned, is pretty much, at the mo- Intended as a Web and television series, "Chadam" is a CG project whose production pipeline is built on top of the Unreal Engine 3 game engine. 25 April 2009

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