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Film expertise boosts future of gaming industry
[Wed 09/07/2008 01:08:13]
By Rodney Appleyard
The boundaries between the visual experiences of movies and computer games are beginning to merge as the technology and tools continue to improve in the games industry.
As a result, game makers are turning to movie special effects artists to help them build exciting environments inside the video games.
This is certainly the case with Electronic Arts, which has employed Neil Eskuri as its senior art director. Eskuri started his feature film work at MetroLight Studios on Total Recall, which won an Oscar for best visual effects.
After that he continued film and video work with Rhythm and Hues for two years before moving to Sony Pictures Imageworks, where he supervised effects work on films like Last Action Hero and Legends of the Fall.
Most recently, Eskuri has been responsible for creating the visual effects in the video racing game: Need For Speed – Carbon. He used Autodesk’s Maya and 3D Max software to create the film-like effects in the game. These tools are traditionally used on huge film projects.
He believes there are plenty of similarities between making effects for games and films.
“The conceptualising and design processes are the same. Just like in movies, what you are trying to do is guide the eyes of each user and make them look on the screen where you want them to look. Particularly in driving games. You want to guide their eyes down the road and give them an idea of where they are going to be turning before they get there.
"But there are also big differences. In games, everything is so integrated. If you break the game somewhere in the code, or in the models, then the whole game goes down and everything is affected. Whereas in movies, this doesn’t necessarily happen – if a piece of animation isn’t working at some point then it’s just one scene that has a problem and needs to be fixed.”
Eskuri has been enjoying making the effects in Need For Speed – Carbon look realistic and photo real, but he says it is also essential to maintain an individual style within the games.
“Although we have tried to make the world and environment as realistic as possible, I also wanted to input some style, so it doesn’t feel like you’re just driving around through the lens of a video camera. We like to input a unique personality into the game and create something you can’t shoot with a video or film camera.”
Eskuri primarily uses Max to build the cars; the worlds around the cars (such as the roads and the terrain); the geometry; the lighting and some of the other effects. As for the animation, this was built using Maya and Motion Builder.
He was attracted to working in the games industry because he always thought the animation created for the games was a bit too clunky and not smooth enough. However, EA offered him the opportunity to do something about this and help them make the experience more realistic. As a result, he has approached the work from a completely original point of view.
“Funnily enough, most of the games that I’ve worked on have speed in the title. So we’ve had to work out a way to make the user feel like they are going fast. We wanted to make sure they always experienced the sense of speed. We ended up thinking: ‘So when you’re going fast, what does it look like and what does it make you feel like?’
"In the end, our software engineers developed a method for integrating a 3D smear, or blur, into the game to establish a sense of speed. We spent a lot of time working on how to find an algorithm that would create an actual 3D blur on the screen.
"This involved having to calculate how all of the points on the screen related to each other from 3D positions and then smear them along the axis of the horizon line and vanishing point. We finally got there. Then we created a way to streak the lights.
"We had to carry out intensive research, such as taking photographs of streetlights streaked from the point of view of a car whizzing past them really fast. We found that the lights tended to jiggle because the camera taking the photographs bounced with the motion of the car. It gave it a really nice look and a strong sense of speed.”
Eskuri’s team also animated texture maps on the streaking lights and then stretched them longer and faster depending on the speed experienced in the game.
“On top of that, we provided a sense of tunnel vision for the users, which they experienced when they were driving really fast. So the faster you go, the more you get this tunnel vision, streaking lights and the 3D blur effect.”
Eskuri is very excited about the future of the gaming experience, which he believes already beats playing on public arcade machines.
“In the future, I think you will have aspects of the game broken up into your handheld system, so you can play part of the game there and then; and then you will be able to continue playing it on your PC at work as well as on your console at home.
"I don’t think anybody has done that yet. It’s going to be an interesting challenge for designers to break up the game in that way, but I think that’s another way to go so that you’re constantly playing and really immersing yourself in one particular type of game experience.”
He firmly believes that the boundaries between effects for films and games are already blurring together and will continue to merge even more.
“There’s definitely going to be a confluence and there already has been to a certain extent. We’ve used a lot of techniques in games that we used in making films. What I’d also like to see one day is the development of the artificial intelligence physics.
"We’ve been working on that over the last few years. For instance, when you’re driving a car in a game at 150km an hour and you come round the corner, it’d be great if you could feel the weight of the car lean into the turn. Or when you jump off a mountain, how cool would it be if you could feel the weight of your character really pushing into the ground. I think those things will really give the user a much more realistic experience.
"We’re currently working on this idea in the animation for a sports game. When the character moves to the left, the weight does not just immediately move the whole body, there’s more of a gradual follow through. We’re spending a lot of time working on the motion of the character to give them more weight and realism.”
Again, Autodesk’s Mad Max, Maya and Motion Builder software have been essential in creating this motion on the screen. Eskuri is determined to break the boundaries of the gaming experience and it appears that his high level experience of making film effects is taking the industry on a new journey, beyond the imagination of traditional game makers.
