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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.04 - JULY 2000
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It Takes More Than Blood And Gore
The game's visual look has a strong anime influence that began with the director John Platten and artist John Paik, who drew the initial character sketches from the beginning pre-production stages. Art directors John Paik and Pakin Liptawat created the backgrounds using hand painted illustrations and Photoshop which were often combined with 3D models created by a team of CG model builders. "We then put in touches such as lights that turn on and off, things moving in the background," says Francis Co, senior animator. "The result is that you are playing with an interactive, animated character within an animated movie. " This approach to game development follows the company's earlier efforts to put traditional 3D characters against lush backgrounds. Challenges began cropping up when those characters got lost within the non-static world and how the characters, with their lower poly count, lacked detail against the illustrative backgrounds. According to Warnock, the Pakin/Paik paintings allowed the artists to keep the anime look consistent in characters and backgrounds. First Liptawat would classically illustrate a scene, painting the path that the character would be walking on, and then giving that to the background artist to layer the shadows and things moving over it. The character animations were layered on top of that.
"When you walk through the backgrounds, the city scenes, skyscrapers, the second and third layers, are Pakin paintings and by keeping our backgrounds illustrated it kept that anime feel throughout," says Warnock. "If you made it to Hell, which is the fourth disc, practically every background is hand painted by Pakin because Alias could not do what we wanted it to do, which was give Hell a moody, outdoors, very organic feel." Kronos' approach to the production of Fear Effectparalleled what would be done for a movie in many ways and the result is stunning. From the Pakin painted backgrounds to the slinky way that the character Hana moves, most game players will find something to like, which is the overall goal of the game developer. "The production cycle was storyboards, to model building, to rendering, to animation," says Co. "It is the closest I have come to working on a movie in that this is the first project we have had with extreme facial expression, giving the characters emotion. We did that well and it is important that we have successfully connected the player to the characters." And There Is More To Come Where the games designed for computer play have been able to take advantage of the increased power of the hard drive over the limitations of the console, next generation consoles such as Sega's Dreamcast, Playstation 2, Nintendo's Dolphin and Microsoft's X-Box are competing to give designers more graphic power leading to more gaming for players. "Creating this sequel game for the Dreamcast certainly gave us a larger number of polygons and a wider color palette to work with," says Ken Ogasawara, producer. "One of the goals of Metal Gear 2creator, Mr. Kojima, has been to keep the player immersed inside of one graphic cell throughout the game. To keep them playing on one layer of reality and this is done by creating a movie that continues the look of the rendered game." |
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Note: Readers may contact any Animation World Magazine contributor by sending an e-mail to editor@awn.com.