Halo 2 Animation Test
- July 01, 2004 15:36 PM PST
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When it comes to eye candy, Halo 2 is sure to impress -- but what does it take to go from imagination to a picture on the screen?
When the developers at Bungie are creating the movements of Master Chief they are working much in the same way that a film director works -- adjusting the camera, giving the talent instructions and then recording the result. The only difference is that in Bungie's world the camera and talent are virtual creations residing inside a computer. Unfortunately, those high resolution models that make the game look so good take a great deal of time to create, and experiementing with them is quite inefficient.So what do developers do? They use storyboards and low resolution animation tests to prototype the work before it goes through a final rendering pass. This allows the developers to visualize the movement without having to wait for all of the artists to finish their work.
A storyboard is the first step in the process. Much like a comic book, a storyboard is used to sketch out ideas. These can be incredibly detailed, or they can be nothing more than a series of stick figures on the back of a napkin. The whole point of a storyboard is to get the initial idea down on paper.
Once the storyboard is finished, the animators will then try to create the scene in wireframe. Wireframe mode is akin to animating just the basic skeleton. Movements are rough, but enough to see if the planned storyboard will work, or if the sequence needs to be sent back to the drawing board.
After approving the wireframe mode, the animators will then make a rough pass of the animation using low resolution models. At this stage the movement should be almost final, however the quality of the visual image is very low.
When the rough pass is approved the animation then moves into the final stage -- where all movement is locked down and the final art assets are created in high resolution. This takes some time, but once processed those individual pieces of artwork are assembled on-the-fly by the Xbox in real time in order to produce all of the amazing in-game animation seen in Halo 2.
