Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6179
January 2010 25 Gaming n n n n the in-game animations for all the characters, creatures, and plants. For several of the script- ed cinematics involving humans and Na'vi, however, Ubisoft motion-captured actors at its Montreal studio using Vicon mocap cameras, processing the data in Autodesk's Motion- Builder and exporting it into the game engine via 3ds Max. "e mocapped performances gave the scripted events a bit more of an edge over the in-game animations, which was cru- cial to differentiating them," says Rang. But animating the humans and Na'vi were a cakewalk compared to the non-bipedal wild- life that stalk the forest floor. Indeed, the for- est is a veritable menagerie of ferocious beasts, like the Banshee, the flying blue dragon the player sits astride as it soars through the sky; the slinking, oil-black Viper Wolves; and the six-legged black panther-like anator. But none proved more nightmarish to rig and ani- mate than the Leonopteryx, an orange dragon and the largest animal on Pandora. "For the Leonopteryx, we spent nearly a month just re- creating Weta's animation rig using a custom rig in 3ds Max, so it resembled what we saw in the video references we received from Light- storm," says Rang. "We had to learn a lot." In terms of modeling, texturing, and rig- ging the Leonopteryx, Rang says the team put a lot of love into properly capturing this amazing flying beast. ere are more than 100 bones in the rig, one skeleton for the data ex- port, and another for controlling the rig. "e main question we constantly asked ourselves was, 'What makes the Leo stand out from all other creatures, and how can we make it truly r ecognizable?' " he relays. To do just that, the artists looked over the length of the wings, the shape of the head and jaw, and the dynamics of liftoff and landing to make sure they got all the details right. "It was one the most complex challenges we had in creating the game," Rang adds. Alien Botany e almost endless diversity in Pandora's glowing, coral-reef inspired plant life made procedural methods of creating the foliage difficult to employ. According to lead texture artist Pierre eriault, those trees and plants— which followed a standard form of stem-with- leaf or trunk-and-branches with leaves—were created using an in-engine plant-creation tool. However, the more complex or alien-shaped plant life had to be hand-modeled by eri- ault and his colleagues using a variety of tech- niques, usually involving Zbrush sculpting of a high-res base mesh or polygon modeling us- ing photo-sourced textures. erefore, the for- ests are usually a mix of procedurally or hand- placed objects. But, given the highly organic nature of the alien plants in Pandora, eriault found himself taking the Zbrush route more often than not. During gameplay, "foliage zones" are defined in-engine, which are then procedurally populat- ed with the appropriate plant-life assets. "Level artists then did extra detail work, adding focal pieces by hand and adjusting settings and zones for the desired look," explains eriault. e plant shaders were similar to the gen- eral-use shaders, encompassing the standard map channels, but sometimes with additional special parameters requested by the artists for translucency effects and glow maps that were controlled by the time of day. Due to memory constraints, sometimes a plant had to forego this special shader and use the general shader when a certain effect was needed, like a cube map or texture blending. In general, anything leafy used the translucent leaf shader, and anything with mass to it used the general-use shader. e shaders went through many exper- imental changes, during which the crew added