With the intimate nature of the cinematic and focus on the characters, our primary reference material was the 17th century artist Caravaggio who was noted for depicting intensely emotional scenes and use of dramatic lighting. Elements used from Caravaggio's style were the dark night time appearance and the single strong light source within each scene. This lighting style is used to illuminate the characters creating sharp tones highlighting their detail and leaving the background in shadow.

Animation
As the cinematic was a mood piece, we used slow and smooth movements for the cameras. The Space Marines, though in a very reflective state of mind, are still marines bred to fight; they move only with purpose and without hesitation.

In the opening of the ritual chamber scene, the Captain is kneeling in prayer with his arm outstretched holding a power sword, a robed figure steps out from the darkness and gently retrieves the holy weapon from the captain. The intention behind the body language and expression is to show the robed figure as a servant, his only reason for existing is to serve the Captain of the Space Marines, nothing more.

We used our in-house motion capture rig for the animation of all characters. One of our actors was a very popular rugby player who had a similar build and heavy walk of a Space Marine. With the actor’s performance and use of correctly weighted weaponry, we captured all the animation outlined in the story-boards. We had solid mocap animation for the character movements and due to the bulky nature and complexity of the Space Marine’s armor we also applied a considerable amount of hand key to remove any intersections.

Texturing and Modeling
Having completed the Dawn of War II cinematic for E3 ?08 we knew exactly what was required for this new chapter of Space Marine, the Ultra Marines.

The Space Marines were built inside 3ds Max as to a high level of detail then into ZBrush for the damage pass. Three separate layers were created, one for overall dents, one for scratches and chunks taken out of armor and finally one for the edge-wear/paint-chips. Doing it this way gave us great control over each specific character so if the client wanted the Captain to be more battle scarred than the rest we tweaked these respective layers individually. If the client requested a 100% clean and undamaged Marine we just pull down the intensity of these three layers. In the end we had four different variants of battle damage on all of the Space Marines using this technique.

The Marines were built from multiple 4096 x 4096 textures with a total of eight unique colour maps being created for every Marine. This was required to make sure all detail will hold up during extreme close up shots.

The process of weathering the armor involved endangering our lives and going to old construction sites and abandoned warehouses to take high resolution photo reference. The textures are about 20% photo and 80% hand painted with layer masks which are great because they are non destructive. The benefit of this method is that it enables you to change and tweak each layer as many times as you like, adding more or less damage where necessary and not losing any resolution or detail with each change.