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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.04 - JULY 2000
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It Takes More Than Blood And Gore
Another character to be found in this game is an MP by the name of Gruff, an outdoorsy, wise woodsman type with a bit of a rastafarian tilt to him. "Before I could begin to animate that character, a lot of work had to be done including inspiration, original design and concept sketches," says Hart. "Sometimes those original design and concept sketches can be too complicated and require too many polys, meaning that we have to simplify that character." For Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2,main character poly counts went as high as 1,100, while supporting characters were given from six to seven hundred, while background creatures had as few as eighty to one hundred. The number of polys assigned to a character depends on its function. Higher poly count models are not found in large groups or in complex environments and a first challenge to game creation is being able to divide the polys up between the characters and the environment. Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
Fear Effectfor Playstation by Kronos is a new game on the console shelves this year that was created as an interactive movie. Unique to this design house is that they do not use 3D Studio Max, opting instead for Alias|Wavefront software. "Stan Liu [Kronos president] was a teacher of Alias and is considered a bit of a guru, so we began working with this program initially," says Ted Warnock, animation director. "The extractor and converters we use are all based on reading Alias files and as a group we are very good at working with what we consider to be a stronger and more powerful program." The whole approach to creating Fear Effectbegan with the script, complete with story and dialogue that the game was then built around. A first person survival-horror-adventure, the game takes place in a real-time world and real-time cameras are used to provide the player with an immersive view of the environment. Adding to the game's visual appeal is that the illustrated backgrounds are actually animated movies that allow for the character to walk past such elements as a revolving light or tendrils of steam escaping a pipe.
As the player traverses the game's environments -- an urban brothel, Eastern jungles and a stylized version of Chinese Hell -- the player automatically switches between the three different main characters, Deke, Glas and Hana, as the plot progresses. Because the game streams data directly from the disc, there is a feeling of interactivity between the player, the character and the environment while the scenes seamlessly change through switching camera angles creating a sense of unease and fear in players. The developers' goal was to create Fear Effectwith a true cinematic feel with the art more along the lines of what you would see in an animated film. "In a lot of games, part of the graphic problem is that you only get so many polygons that you can draw from, and texture mapping has to be small to fit in RAM so when people make the decision to have a free roaming real-time camera in the game, that limits the graphic quality," explains Ted Warnock, animation director. "We decided to use locked cameras so the character can walk toward and away from the camera giving a more cinematic feel. Locked cameras also allowed us to have each background shot play back as a looping animated movie." Adding to the "in the game" feeling are Fear Effect'sillustrative backgrounds which are elaborate movie sets that the animators built using Alias software. The sets are built similar to how they are built for CGI films, such as Pixar's A Bug's Lifeaccording to Warnock. |
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Note: Readers may contact any Animation World Magazine contributor by sending an e-mail to editor@awn.com.