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Machinima-Specific Techniques Despite all this emphasis on Machinima as a cinematic form, and despite the fact that it does share a great deal with other visual media, it's still a unique form, with its own strengths and weaknesses, and hence unique approaches for overcoming them. In the few years that artists have been working in Machinima, the body of Machinima-specific techniques has grown at an astonishing rate: it would be quite possible to write numerous articles on this subject alone! To conclude this whistle-stop tour of Machinima cutscene production, I'll discuss a few specific examples of tried and tested Machinima techniques that you can put into effect in your cutscenes. Composite models. Machinima doesn't have an awful lot of common ground with Newtonian physics, but one trait it does share is a tendency to break down when faced with portraying either very large or very small spaces. The portrayal of very large landscapes is half-and-half a technology and technique issue, and is a very complex area -- however, there are one or two well-used techniques for dealing with close-ups and extreme close-ups. In particular, when a scene demands an extreme close-up of detailed interaction that isn't easily created using conventional Machinima (interaction between a model and the landscape, in particular), directors will tend to switch to a composite model. The principle here is simple enough. When the close-up is required, the camera cuts to it as normal. However, instead of cutting in closer to the previous model, we instead cut to a totally different composite of the entire shot (landscape, characters, and all), all created as a single model in any modeling package, and textured exactly as the original landscape and characters were. This model is then animated in whatever way is necessary (a foot kicking up sand and leaving a detailed imprint, say), and the camera stays on this animation before cutting back to the original scene. To the viewer, therefore, it looks like we've simply cut in to a close-up of the action, before cutting away again, However, by using this technique, we're able to add detail and interaction that would have been impossible in the original set. An example: in Strange Company's film, Ozymandias, the storyboard called for us to cut from a wide shot (of the protagonist kneeling by the eponymous statue) to a close-up of his hand brushing piled sand away from the statue's plaque. Obviously, this wasn't easily going to be possible using a conventional map/model setup.
Instead, our modeler created a model of the entire close-up scene (hand, plaque, sand, and base of statue), then created the "brushing" animation, complete with moving sand, in 3D Studio Max, before importing it into Lithtech Film Producer (our production suite on that project). We then simply cut from the wide shot in the desert map to a close-up of the model, positioned underneath the other map, and triggered the animation. When the shot concluded, we simply cut back to the original wide shot, and the film proceeded seamlessly. Skin techniques. As I mentioned in the first part of this article, it is possible to use skin textures within a Machinima-based cutscene to simulate a lot of detail models may otherwise not posses (for example, Strange Company's Eschaton: Nightfall used skins to create both lip-synching and eye movement effects in Quake II, effects otherwise impossible without access to the engine's source code). This ability can be used to add atmosphere to a film, as well as to cover up a lot of the common weaknesses of 3D engines. A good example application here is the simulation of complex lighting, on the face in particular. Take a shot from "real" film, such as the poster shot from Eraserhead for example: the complex shadowing here, with shadow from one part of the face falling on other parts, simply can't be reproduced using today's real-time engines without a hideous performance hit. As a Machinima director, you might think that any effort to reproduce such a shot in your work is doomed to failure.
It's not hard to see where I'm going here. By taking the standard skin for that character, setting up the shot in your Machinima package (including the appropriate lighting for the background), then manually altering the skin used on that shot (perhaps by rendering it in a conventional 3D package), it's possible to fake such a complex shadowing shot, and reap the rewards in atmosphere and "wow" factor that extend from such a trick. Of course, such effects are expensive in development time. However, for a truly dramatic shot, they may be worth it. It's also worth noting that if the face moves or the lighting changes even slightly, you will need to create several new skins, one for each lighting state. In effect, you're manually creating light maps for the face. If you use this technique, as with all such "cheat" shots, don't let your shot linger too long, lest your audience manage to see the man behind the curtain (or in this case the airbrush). It's far better to astonish them and move on. Dynamic Algorithms. This last technique is very experimental, and is currently undergoing testing in Lithtech Film Producer. However, if it is integrated correctly into an engine, the visual rewards may well be truly astonishing. In short, cutscenes within game engines differ in engine requirements in one simple way: it's possible for their creators to tell absolutely exactly what the system requirements will be for their scenes at any time. Thus, if a scene is designed in such a way that it underutilizes the system resources available, it's theoretically possible then to enable techniques which wouldn't be usable on a more complex scene to render the current scene in a more complex way. What does this mean? Well, at the most extreme end, it means that using a current real-time engine, if a scene only has 200 or 300 polygons in view, it's possible to use genuine raytracing algorithms for the lighting effects on that scene. More realistically, it means that cutscenes can ratchet their computational complexity up and down as the complexity of the shots change -- a shot with a simple backdrop and few characters could, for example, enable additional shadowing, higher-quality texturing, or increased real-time lighting quality. Of course, this capability has to be built into the engine, and has to be used carefully, lest the cutscenes start to differ in visual "feel" from the main gameplay. However, if such a technique is used appropriately -- perhaps increasing the number of real-time light sources available on a close-up to give a character's face greater depth, for example -- it can add a lot to a cutscene. And... Action! Obviously, in an article like this one, it's only possible to scratch the surface of such a complex and interesting area -- nothing less than the growth of a new art form. However, I hope it gives you some pointers and encourages you to experiment, to investigate further, and to refuse to accept (many) compromises in your real-time 3D cutscene design. For further information, I heartily encourage you to check out these resources:
Exposure:
one of the better conventional filmmaking sites on the Internet. For
information on film-making and film theory, this is a good place to
start. Katz, Steven D. Film Directing: Shot by Shot. Michael Wiese Productions, 1991; ISBN 0-941188-10-8. I agree with Hal Barwood that this is one of the best bases for learning the language of film available.
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