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This is a brief summary of the second Overwatch panel!
In-Game Cinematic Panel
- Teamwork: Cinematics are created as a collaboration of the IGC and the Overwatch Engine Team
- A whole new engine had to be built to allow creation of cinematics
- The team has about 25 members
- The team incorporates multiple Blizzard game engines
Story Development
- Planning started early 2017, when the map didn't exist yet
- Characters: Junkrat and Roadhog
- Concept art, and the Queen's Decree was given to the team
- During their exile, they [Junkrat, and Roadhog] stole everything they could
- Choosing the place: the gate of the town
- The Hook: Junkrat just wants to light the fuse to blow stuff up
- Overwatch cinematics up to this point were very empotional
- The title sequence was made to feel like a fun adventure
The Pitch
- The cinematic was pitched without a script or a storyboard
- The whole pitch was acted out
- Greenlight to continue
- The storyboard was very close to the final cinematic
Nuts and Bolts of the Overwatch Engine
- Needed to be able to capture images and insert assets to the engine
- Buffers: images that represent data
- Set the Scene: TED is a light Overwatch engine used to set scenes, use the camera, add animations
- The effects system drove the capture
- The Play of the Game system and Capture system was very useful
- New Camera system: had to make a free movement camera
- Make the game engine not optimize engine by forcing quality 11
- Break apart the scene into assets so they can be manipulated
- Inserting the images to the engine
- The Graphics cards were not able to support Quality 11
- Slowed frames down to 1 FPS
- The cinematic took up 5 TB of space
Animations
- The game team helps the IGC team understand the character
- Play of the Games give a really good insight into the character
- Reference is used to discover ideas, facial expressions and nuances
- Brad passed out during one of the takes when acting for the reference
- Smear Frames: makes the animation more realistic by smearing the character
- Makes it easier for the eye to follow, only visible in slow motion
- Jokes are added by animators sometimes
The Engine
- The characters, costumes, and variations are taken from the game engine
- Everything that doesn't already exists in the game has to be manually made
- The mesh of the characters has to be improved, because cinematics have more detail
- A rig has to be built, which is the skeleton. This gives points of articulation
- Limbs: these are added separately as controls for the animatior
- Junkrat alone has 78 limbs and 524 controls
- There are multiple automated control that move controls together
- The face has multiple animated controls to create facial expressions
- Effects are hand drawn frame-by-frame
- All these are then added to TED for capture
Art and Lighting
- The map was in development during the cinematic development
- The final map was used as a base
- Ambient light: simulates sunlight in the cinematic
- The characters could not be seen while the light was added
- Multiple point lights are added to make characters and items pop
- After lights are added, it is ran through compositing
- Because the payload was not used in game, which allowed to make it much more exaggerated
- A surprised Pachimari was added to the cinematic as an Easter egg
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