Oddworld Inhabitants again pushes the boundaries of CG with its forthcoming game, Stranger. All images unless otherwise noted © Oddworld Inhabitants.

Attendees at SIGGRAPH 2004 saw among the festival’s selections a game cinematic from Stranger, the Oddworld Inhabitants videogame that’s slated for release next spring by Electronic Arts. The clip features an exotic bounty hunter on a mission that makes the classic "wild west" genre look tame.

Oddworld has been favored by SIGGRAPH juries before, earning notice for cinematics from an award-winning game catalog that includes Abe’s Oddysee, Abe’s Exoddus and Munch’s Oddysee. What SIGGRAPH audiences are glimpsing of Stranger may look like classic Oddworld — offbeat characters presented in high-quality Maya animation. The animation has the distinctive look that company president and creative director Lorne Lanning once described as “Muppets meets The X-Files.”

But this year’s Stranger cinematic signals the start of a sea change in the way that the 10-year-old Oddworld is creating CGI. Many of the clip's richly-textured elements were actually created as realtime game elements — unlike the pre-rendered approach that has typified most game cinematic production. Using a proprietary technology dubbed “The Strange Engine,” Oddworld is pursuing a strategy that Lanning thinks will make the process of creating CGI more like live-action production than keyframe animation.

What’s significant about Lanning’s view is not simply that realtime animation technology is enabling people in game production to work more cost-effectively by reducing the amount of time-intensive software rendering. Lanning thinks that realtime and A.I.-driven tools will have an influence beyond games, changing how CGI will be produced for movies and television as well.

The Backstory
“We've been looking at the realtime capabilities in the engine that we've built for Stranger,” says Lanning. “We first wrote this for the Xbox (Microsoft published Oddworld’s Munch's Oddysee). So it's still capped by 64MB of RAM and the processing power that's in the Xbox, which is basically an under-$200 commercial technology. But taking that into account, we're still looking to get performances out of a realtime engine, which is less like the way computer animation directors get performances out of CG characters and a little closer to the way live-action directors get performances on a set.

“This is the big boundary that is starting to crumble. We could never think of CG as a live-action set before. In conventional CG production, a director could never say, ‘Cut! Don't WALK over there, RUN!’ A live-action director can say, ‘Run over there — and on the way — be who you are.’ The actor knows how to navigate his world, so if he’s running uphill, for example, he’ll be running a little slower.”

Even in earlier Abe titles, Oddworld was creating cutting-edge 3D work.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence
In the world Lanning envisions, CG characters will possess “navigational skills” as well. The proliferation of A.I.-driven technology is key to Lanning's view of realtime CG production. "In realtime, you’re thinking of characters more as autonomous actors. You think, ‘What is this character’s personality? What are his abilities?’ That gives you a walk cycle and a run cycle. Then you ask, ‘What can he do in this world?’ He can throw punches and climb ropes and jump off buildings.’ So then you start building the artificial intelligence, which we call the character motion code. We also build all the navigation information about the world that the character inhabits. We’re not thinking that this is a guy who shows up in a particular shot — this is a guy who LIVES in that world.”

Oddworld uses a linear performance editor to execute this approach. “It’s an editing interface that we created that interfaces to Maya and a game engine at the same time. It allows us to control the performance of the characters through a very simple interface that enables us to tell a character: ‘Run over there,’ and the camera will truck over the necessary frames. It's like an Avid interface, but instead of moving clips of video around, we’re moving modules of A.I. commands around. Watching it play back is like watching an edited sequence.”