Cinegroupe Gives Classic Tale New Twist With NetImmerse

CineGroupe Interactive developers have created a PC game prototype based on the children’s tale about a wooden puppet that wants to become a live boy. PINOCCHIO 3001, a third-person puzzle game, is based on an upcoming feature-length animated movie of the same name, which is being developed by CineGroupe Inc., Castelao Productions SNA (Spain) and AnimaKids Productions (France). CineGroupe Interactive, is using NDL’s NetImmerse to give the classic story of Pinocchio a futuristic facelift for young gamers. “The NetImmerse engine allowed us to create a huge free-roaming environment with all of the lights, textures and reflections that are intended for the movie,” says Valerie Henaire, the game’s producer. “NetImmerse was the only engine versatile enough to help us get the job done in such a short amount of time. The final results are stunning.” CineGroupe’s technical director, Luc Lavergne, says that NetImmerse made it easier for developers to maintain visual continuity between the film and the game. “The outstanding rendering capabilities in NetImmerse, including multi-texturing, helped us achieve the look of the computer-generated imagery in the film,” he says. “With NetImmerse we were able to build very convincing special effects, all in real-time.” The PINOCCHIO 3001 team also used AnImmerse, NDL’s keyframe manager within NetImmerse 4.0, to speed development. AnImmerse allows users to preview animations and set up transitions to blend between different animation sequences. “AnImmerse has at least tripled our animation export efficiency,” says Sebastien Harton, lead 3D animator for PINOCCHIO 3001, “which allowed us to focus on the artistic aspect of the animations. After just four weeks we were interactively controlling a fully animated character that was impeccably blending from one animation to another. I’m convinced that no tool other than AnImmerse could have made this possible.”