nyone who has played Rise of Nations, is familiar with the Vinci nation and the quests fought on behalf of the many personas available in that game. Leading in from this, the Real-Time Strategy system makes the ‘Rise of Legends’ a game not to be missed.
Big Huge Games commissioned Blur
Studio to animate and produce the cinematic, with the same power as was generated with the popular ‘WarHammer’ promotion.
CGSociety caught up with Dave Wilson and the crew at Blur and asked them about the production workflow. “We played around with a few ideas initially in the script,” Wilson begins, “bouncing ideas back and forth between ourselves and Dave Insecore over at Big Huge Games.” The general idea was eventually flushed out by Tim [Miller], David Nibbelin (Layout Artist) and Wilson. “We initially wanted to show short snippets of each race but that ended up being too expensive and, well, just not cool enough,” he continues. One of the ingame stills that Big Huge Games sent Blur Studio actually inspired the final intro. “There was this awesome shot of the Doge Hammer, a particularly HUGE cannon, blowing up a bridge and we took that and expanded on it, I personally always like to have some ‘hero’ character in the piece, someone to take you through it.”
Big Huge Games gave the team at Blur full leverage to generate some action with the swathe of characters available in the game. “Big Huge just really let us run with it and they picked some units they really wanted to see in the piece,” Wilson describes. “We loved the Vinci sets we saw in-game, so we used the units they suggested, used the Vinci City as our environment and we went from there.”
Some of the shots seen on the cinematic, like that Big Red Dragon [Rukh] crashing down on the Vinci Hero, were all key-framed, which was rather painful to do. That Rukh alone had over 500 animation controls, but Davy Sabbe did an awesome job of bringing all those shots to life. The Blur crew mocaped anything that moved remotely like a human: the Vinci Hero; the Vinci Grunts fleeing into the city and the Golems chasing them down. But the Scorpions, Clockworkmen, the Vinci Hero's Mech and Rukh's were all keyframed.
Right around the time the studio crew was working on ‘Rise of Legends’, Blur sprung for new workstations for the studio. They're now working on Dual Opteron (Dual Core 2.4Ghz) processors, with 4GBs of RAM and NVIDIA Quadro 4500 Video Cards with 512Mb RAM. They hooked all the older boxes up to their farm which is now 600 processors strong.
“If you add up all the rendered layers and test renders we pumped out on ‘Rise of Legends’ it totaled around 207,000 frames,” says Wilson. “Put back to back, that's roughly 143 minutes of renders, all for just a three-minute movie. We do try and pack a lot of shit into those shots.”
