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Step By Step: Warhammer

Mar 1, 2005 12:00 PM, by Ellen Wolff

Two Minutes' Mayhem

Gamers worldwide know the futuristic world of Warhammer, the popular fighting game from THQ/Relic Entertainment. For the new Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War, one challenge was to create a CG cinematic opening that would kick off the action with an adrenaline rush and quickly immerse players in the battle at hand. That challenge fell to Venice, Calif.-based Blur Studios, which created two minutes of pure mayhem, filled with scores of fully rendered characters, otherworldly weapons, and nonstop visual effects. Executed in a style that evokes classic combat films, the Warhammer cinematic climaxes with a battle-weary Space Marine planting the victor's tattered flag.

Saving Private Ryan was a key source of inspiration, and Blur's goal was to cover the melee as if a camera operator was running amongst the Marines as they fight killer Orks. “David Nibbelin did the animatic, and he mimicked Steadicams to make you feel like you're in the thick of things, with blood splashing on the camera lens,” says Blur's CG supervisor Dave Wilson, “When you're in a big battle, you don't want to be 200 yards up on a crane. With CG pieces it's too easy to make the camera stationary. That's a giveaway that you're working in CG.”

Nibbelin got animatic as tight as humanly possible before CG supervisor Paul Taylor commenced shooting motion-capture sessions with the studio's Vicon 8 system. “We worked out the action in the animatic down to the frame so that when Paul shot the motion capture we'd have a clear — maybe even anal — guide!” says Wilson. “You could watch this animatic and the final piece side by side and they'd be in near perfect sync.”

After the mo-cap sessions, says Wilson, “We took the data — not cleaned up much at all — and put it onto the characters in the animatic. Our animators had to do a lot of tweaking and keyframe animation after that because motion capture only gets you about 60 percent of the way. With mo cap you've got a key on every frame. We stripped out a lot of that and just kept the main motion points. Then the animators worked on top of that. It's kind of a hybrid between mo cap and keyframe animation.”

Blur's animators took advantage of a wealth of model and texture material provided by Relic, which, like Blur, works in 3ds Max. “They supplied us with all the in-game models and even in-game animation, so we got a feel for the way their characters moved,” says Wilson. “We were able to reuse their in-game models, although obviously we had restrictions, since those models had around 2,000 polys per character. The high-res characters that we modeled for close-up shots got up to 300,000 to 400,000 polygons. Relic's textures were awesome, and we took their texture sheets, changed them slightly and reused them for specular or bump channels.”

Blur employed Brazil for rendering, averaging about 20 to 25 passes per shot. “But for an effects-heavy shot it could jump to 35 to 40 rendered passes,” says Wilson. “We even rendered out 60 layers on our most complicated shots. It seemed like every shot was flooded with muzzle flashes, tracer fire, dust, and debris. We had one effects artist working on splattering blood alone.”

While Warhammer has a realistic look, Brazil's global illumination capabilities were only employed on the character passes; not on the wide battlefield shots. “For the environments we found it was a little slow,” says Wilson. “Because of the amount of calculations that are required for a wide area, it can flicker a bit and produce artifacts. So we set up custom light rigs for the environment. The ambient global illumination look is just hundreds of spotlights. It's a total cheat.”

Passes were rendered separately so that Wilson's team would have flexibility when everything was brought into Digital Fusion for compositing. “If we had only one render — including the characters, environments, and all the different light passes — and something looked wrong, we'd have to re-render the whole thing. In Fusion if we wanted to change the color of the key light for example, we could change it on the fly. It takes more setup, and in some cases it might have taken more time to render all those layers, but more often than not, having all those layers provides more control and gives you a better look.”

Wilson relied on Blur's proprietary tools to do this efficiently, however, including a layer manager called The Onion. “That allows us to assign different properties — such as reflections — to each layer. We can toggle on or off those properties and then record that data. We save them as Render Elements, which is another tool that we developed. We have a display panel listing all of these Render Elements. One could be, for example, a character key pass, which is everything in the environment except for the character and the light that's illuminating him. Then we'll have an ambient light pass of just the environment. We'll have 20 layers in a Max file, and at a click of a button it will turn on all the lights that are needed for that layer. When it's 4 a.m. and we need to re-render something, if we had to manually turn on every light, it's too easy to make a mistake. Since we had to take this piece from storyboards to final composites in under a month, we had no time for mistakes!”

Credit Roll

Creative Director -	Tim Miller
CG Supervisors -	Paul Taylor, Dave Wilson
Animation Supervisors -	Marlon Nowe, Jeff Weisend
Effects Supervisor -	Kirby Miller
Producer -	Al Shier
Mo Cap -	Paul Taylor, John Bunt, Richard Machowicz
Matte Painter -	Dylan Cole
Concept Artists -	Sean McNally, Chuck Wojtkiewicz
Animation Technical
Director-	Jon Jordan
Animatic -	David Nibbelin
Modeling, Lighting, and Compositing -	Heikki Anttila, Corey Butler, Tim Jones, Kevin Margo

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