Red Faction Armageddon. Video game cinematic sequence work.
I am extremely proud of this project. Not only was it my second project out in the professional realm it was enormous in scope. We worked closely with Volition Games to work on cinematic scenes inside Red Faction Armageddon which was recently released at the beginning of E3. I actually was fortunate enough to be able to go to E3 and meet some of the other team members from Volition. As a personal notation I have to say Volition is awesome, not only are the people we worked with directly amazing, they make great games.
Our initial turn key solution at Pendulum Studios focused on using in game captures, but inevitably there was a decision to shift the entire pipeline to a pre-rendered process. Which is a little more at home with regards to established pipelines at Pendulum.
My main function on this piece was actually rather robust. I started out with character shading, then into environment shading and lighting and finally into shot setup, character lighting and rendering. Practically most of the characters you see had look development done by me. Hale, Darius, Winters, Red Faction soldiers, cultists. There was a combined effort from me and William Schithius (who I worked side by side with in shading environments and lighting assets and characters for this project, as well as being a awesome MEL guru). Initial asset upresing was done by Pat Switzer and Gina Adimova.
During this phase of the operation we had gone in and setup environments for shading, lighting and rendering by matching the source provided by Volition via the current game build. After animation caching had been accomplished and assets were ready for importation. We would go through and create a final render setup with all corrected scenes and begin the lighting of the characters.
Having been my first production work utilizing the pre-render pipeline at Pendulum, it had become apparent there were some serious technical issues with Maya. There were a lot of hurdles with nested referencing, which I had never used as the complexity of work established at school never required it. Having gotten to this particular point in the pipeline we had run into some very trying issues. One of the main ones was light linking. Just thinking about it makes me uncomfortable but I sat down with William and we were able to figure things out from a technical standpoint and using MEL he coded up a quick method of fixing this terminal complication. The other proprietary tools we had to remedy this were broken, severely. So I took the night and decided to breakdown the process of cleanup so I could discuss fixing it with William the next morning then we could implement a fix as soon as possible.
As soon as some of the kinks were worked out we were able to simply move forward and get work done. There were times when things ran smoothly, there were however other times when things went horribly wrong. We worked hard at fixing our problems to end up at a point were we could enjoy lighting scenes and setting up renders for compositing. We proceeded progressively based on the producer's shot priority inside of our shotgun toolset, but there were obvious hurdles to overcome to maintain our projected deadline.
Other than focusing our efforts on aesthetics we would stay around the studio to ensure that our final output had come out correctly. If things needed to be fixed we were always within arms reach to come and fix things.
One of the most back breaking projects I have worked on, but as well on of the most enjoyable for the payoff. In the end it was nice to go to E3 and see some of the Volition guys and hear that they liked the cinematic scenes a lot.
