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Step By Step:
The Lord of the Rings

Oct 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

The Battle for Middle-Earth

“Reality is only the most popular fantasy,” says Richard Taylor, cinematics director for Electronic Arts' latest Lord of the Rings game, The Battle for Middle-Earth. Taylor aimed to give the computer game's 42 cinematics a level of reality that would support the story's emotional arc, while also keeping the look consistent with the game's realtime animation. He didn't want movie-quality cinematics to introduce each battle and then fall off into cruder looking game CG. “People have done beautiful Maya cinematics that aren't anything like the game play. I had to figure out a way to shoot cinematics using the low level of detail that was built into the game, and still have lots of production value.”

Because this is a realtime strategy game — where you're looking down on the game action from a 45-degree angle — the level of detail in the models is generally low. “So this design is based on not getting too close to low poly-count models,” notes Taylor. “It's all about camera moves, lighting, staging, and cutting — using real film techniques.”

To get the richest look possible within the limitations of a game environment, Taylor and art development director Matt Britton utilized texture maps drawn from the extensive archives provided by Rings film director Peter Jackson. “We couldn't use the film's Maya models because our game engine pipeline runs through [Discreet's] 3ds Max, but we got lots of visual references as a starting point for our textures,” Britton says.

This is evident in the battle of Amon Hen, a confrontation with the evil Uruk-Hai warriors. Costume textures from the film give the Uruk-Hai a convincing appearance despite the low-poly-count of the characters themselves.

Construction of this cinematic began in Digital Element's WorldBuilder. “WorldBuilder shows the basic architecture and pathways where the characters will be moving,” explains Taylor. “The way I did the storyboards was to go into WorldBuilder and pick points of view where I wanted the camera to be. Then I would pull those frames out and our storyboard artist would overdraw them with the characters included.”

Animation of the characters themselves was handled through the game engine. Artificial intelligence built into the engine prevented the characters from running into each other or into the architecture in the scene. “Everything — whether it's a guy or a building — has a little collision-detection box on it that prevents it from hitting other things,” Britton explains. “The warriors are all motion-captured. We have hundreds of these tiny units, and there can easily be 30 different animations on each one, whereas in a previous game [using this engine] the characters might have had six.”

Scattered throughout this cinematic are plants as well. “The best looking plants we could get with the least amount of polys!” Britton says. But they served an important purpose besides set dressing. “One of the things that I did often was to put plants in front of the characters to hide their feet because most of these characters are not generating shadows — they just carry a soft darkening underneath them,” Taylor says.

Given his goal of not making cinematics look noticeably more detailed than the game animation, he admits, “We can't have an actual shadow generated by the body. But when you see a character's low-res feet on the ground it's a dead giveaway. So we grabbed plants and moved them around into different positions to cover up those feet.”

When it came to adding visual effects like fire or smoke, once again the low level of detail required that Taylor had to be careful about where they positioned the camera and how close to particular particle systems they were. “I've used fire a lot as a transitional device and as a filter that we look through. Fortunately, we didn't have to render at game rate. We could also come back and layer things together in [Adobe's] After Effects or in [Apple's] Final Cut Pro to put in some extra details,” he says.

All of the CG was rendered in the game engine. “We wanted to be really consistent, and not have a jarring jump to another look,” Britton explains. However, as Taylor says, “There are just three light sources in the actual game, so we had to cheat like crazy!”

What really stands out is the camerawork. According to Taylor, the conventional approach usually means just putting a locator on the main character. “The camera follows him wherever he goes. You're not moving around him or letting him come in and out of scenes.

“The camera system was very limited when I got involved with this game. For example, we couldn't do curved moves. We worked out a way to make a curved track. We could boom up or down or move the camera anywhere we wanted. We were able to put roll in the camera and to change the millimeter of the lens during a shot. We could do, in essence, a zoom — and go from a wide-angle view to a telephoto. We built those things from scratch for this game,” he says.

“Fake” rack focus was achieved though judicious compositing. “We created elements in planes,” Taylor says. “We'd shoot the background, mid-ground, and foreground as separate elements and then composite them and do a fake rack focus. “

The final element completing the scene was a “cyclorama” sky. “I made a full panorama in [Corel's] Bryce that was stitched together and then dropped in,” recalls Taylor. “In the end, the look is really close to what the storyboards were. Fortunately, a game cinematic — unlike the game itself — isn't interactive. So when it's done, it's done.”

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Credit Roll

Executive Producer -	Mark Skaggs
Game Design Director -	Dustin Browder
Senior Producers -	Harvard Bonin, Mike Verdu
Cinematics Director -	Richard Taylor
Art Development Director -	Matt Britton
Editor -	Nate Hubbard
Cinematic Artist -	Greg Black
Storyboard Artist -	Michael Zimmerman
Map Beautification -	Charles Jacobi
Structure Modeling, Texture Painting -	Thomas Jung, John Robert Register
Character Modeling, Texture Painting -	Kich Ma
Lead Animator -	Adam McCarthy
Animator -	Eugene Jarvis
Technical Director -	Sean O'Hara

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.