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Season 4... Just old dungeons and new ilvl?
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Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Panel
Q&A
- Blizzard has a new group called The Forge that will be focused on telling stories in the Blizzard universe.
- In one cinematic idea, Chromie could have a vision of what is happening in Draenor as a flashback.
- Another idea was the siege of Shattrath.
- The idea selected was drinking the blood of Mannoroth, which caused everything to change.
- The team then creates a temporary drawn rough version of the cinematic with temporary sound effects.
- The Warlords cinematic was much darker than the Mists of Pandaria cinematic, so they pushed the realism more. They tried to capture all of the subtle things about Orcs, making their mouth move properly with the sound.
- The Iron Star was used by Garrosh to impress everyone. He brought the concept with him after breaking out of jail.
- Dave Kosak dressed up to pitch the Burdens of Shaohao story, and the team decided it would be something nice to animate. It was originally just going to be panning down a scroll while telling a story, but it got more intricate and cinematic like as the development process continued.
- Lords of War originally was going to concentrate on the story of Yrel and Durotan, but things changed.
- The Patch 5.4 cinematic was sketched out by using screenshots from the game.
- Garrosh originally was using a normal Orc model, then got a new model that was a little bit better, and then got another model using some new tech used for the Pandaren. The new Garrosh model was done at the same time as the new Orc models. Garrosh has a lot more facial animation in the 5.4 cinematic than ever before. Going forward they will have to match the game system level of detail in facial expressions.
- Mannoroth in the cinematic was a nice chance to upgrade the old model. During work on his model they were careful not to lose the essence of Mannoroth. He is the closest to the Warcraft III model, he doesn't have lips or eyelids.
- The team uses live video references to create the cinematic shots.
- They were looking for a shot at the end that would be perfect and reflect changing history, and found it with the scene of Grommash at the end.
- The cinematic is broken down into little drawings that help define what colors will appear in each shot to keep things looking good and not overdoing the color.
- The Warlords announcement trailer was done before most of the new models or zones were ready, so the team made the most of what they had ready.
- The silhouette of the Warlords was mostly done by using existing assets, as the models of the Warlords models weren't done.
- Most of the Warlord stories were going to be done with comics, but some got changed to the Lords of War series.
- Lords of War started with little drawings and words to go with each panel. These got turned into layouts, which is then passed to the artists to be turned into the final art.
- Sin City was the original art style reference for Lords of War.
- The art was extremely violent at one point, so they pulled it back a little bit.
- Chris Metzen said it would look better with color instead of black and white.
- The cinematics team felt like they were getting close to done, but decided the blood scooping shot didn't look right. They went to the store and bought many different liquids to try and find a live reference that worked.
- Every expansion had more and more in-game cinematics, and Warlords is no exception.
- Khadgar was a shirtless human male until the model was finally done.
- The cinematics team has to wait on assets to be done before they can finish the cinematics.
- The cinematics were finished just in time to get them on the Warlords disc, completed in the last 3 weeks.
- Lords of War wraps drawings around simple geometry and then adds a little bit of motion or camera angle changes. They have to keep the amount of movement reasonable so that people don't expect fully animated movies, so mostly of the environment can be animated, but characters had to have limited animation. It has to look like a storyboard and not an animation.
Q&A
- Yrel will appear throughout Warlords.
- All of the other teams at Blizzard were excited by Lords of War, so we might see motion stories for other games in the future.
- The team worked closely to make sure Varian in Lords of War looked similar to how he does in WoW and that the WoW team was happy with his look.
- Selling rough art from when the team is coming up with ideas is an interesting idea.
- The Warlords in-game cinematics are using more CGI and tools the public has access to, so there aren't many things they can release to help the machinima community.
- Most of the shots in Lord of War are one painting with many layers.
- The team starts with a long cinematic with 50 shots, cut it down to what would make them cry (30 shots) and then puts some back that they really missed to bring them back up to 40 shots. They want to have enough quality footage and not make cinematics too long or too short.
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