For Blur Studios, the PC game Hellgate: London was an unusual project because of the number of assets required and the lengthy timeline. All Hellgate: London images © Electronic Arts.

From a production standpoint, Kevin Margo, CG supervisor for Blur Studios, says the PC game Hellgate: London was an unusual project because of the number of assets required and the lengthy timeline.

"It was this three-year undertaking," he says. "It was always this project that was kind of running and at various times it was at full swing and at other times on the back burner. Usually, it's three, four months, do it, done and see ya."

Margo says Flagship Studios was a new company when it contacted Blur to create a game trailer that could be shown at E3 to generate buzz for the products it would eventually release. The game itself was still largely undefined, and Blur had an unusual free hand in creating concepts, characters and the look of things.

"They were very open to our concept guys doing sketches and paintings of characters and environments and us saying, 'What do you think of this?' And they'd be like: 'Cool! We won't be modeling that character for the game for another six months, but you guys go ahead, you make it for the cinematic you're doing and we like it enough that we'll just mimic what you guys do when it comes time for us to make the in-game model,'" Margo says.

Work on the project came in cycles, with each cycle having a more typical production timeline of three to four months. Blur had a core of eight to 10 artists on the project, augmenting them as needed. Margo estimates that easily 50 to 60 artists had a hand in the game.

Flagship provided no storyboards, so it was up to Blur whether to develop their own storyboards or work out scenes in the layout phase, which is easier for conversation scenes. Margo says one artist did the entire layout to keep it consistent, before sending scenes off to an animation supervisor who makes sure everything gets properly rigged and animated.

Flagship Studios was a new company when it contacted Blur to create a game trailer that could be shown at E3 to generate buzz for the products it would eventually release.

Margo says they used a stacked pipeline to handle the modeling, rigging and animation that works on all those processes simultaneously. For example, a model that's maybe 90% done will be handed off to a rigger who creates a rough setup so the animator can get started. As each element is refined, the updates are passed on to the others until the process is complete.

On Hellgate: London, they used 3ds Max for all the character modeling, environment modeling, rigging and animation. Brazil was the renderer and compositing was done in Fusion. The project ended up requiring a large number of assets. Counting background characters, Blur created 60 to 70 characters and 10 high-resolution environments for what ended up being between eight and 10 minutes of cinematics.

As the project progressed, Flagship's requests became increasingly specific. "They had all their characters fleshed out and they knew exactly what they wanted and are trying to wrap up the game."

Cinematics also have to match up with how game itself looks, which can sometimes be a creative challenge. "It's kind of hard when they say, 'It has to look like this,' but we're capable of doing more," Margo suggests.

While Hellgate: London offered a long schedule and creative collaboration, Blur's work on another PC game, Tabula Rasa, was much more typical. Margo says they were given scripts and storyboards, with a production schedule of three to four months.