[작품소개]Rise of Legends

nyone who has played Rise of Nations, is familiar with the Vinci nation and the quests fought on behalf of the many personas available in that game. Leading in from this, the Real-Time Strategy system makes the ‘Rise of Legends’ a game not to be missed. Big Huge Games commissioned Blur Studio to animate and produce the cinematic, with the same power as was generated with the popular ‘WarHammer’ promotion. CGSociety caught up with Dave Wilson and the crew at Blur and asked them about the production workflow. “We played around with a few ideas initially in the script,” Wilson begins, “bouncing ideas back and forth between ourselves and Dave Insecore over at Big Huge Games.” The general idea was eventually flushed out by Tim [Miller], David Nibbelin (Layout Artist) and Wilson. “We initially wanted to show short snippets of each race but that ended up being too expensive and, well, just not cool enough,” he continues. One of the ingame stills that Big Huge Games sent Blur Studio actually inspired the final intro. “There was this awesome shot of the Doge Hammer, a particularly HUGE cannon, blowing up a bridge and we took that and expanded on it, I personally always like to have some ‘hero’ character in the piece, someone to take you through it.” Big Huge Games gave the team at Blur full leverage to generate some action with the swathe of characters available in the game. “Big Huge just really let us run with it and they picked some units they really wanted to see in the piece,” Wilson describes. “We loved the Vinci sets we saw in-game, so we used the units they suggested, used the Vinci City as our environment and we went from there.”                 Watch “Rise of Legends” - 2:44 (22MB mov) Requires CGTalk or CGSociety Membership & QuickTime 6 Some of the shots seen on the cinematic, like that Big Red Dragon [Rukh] crashing down on the Vinci Hero, were all key-framed, which was rather painful to do. That Rukh alone had over 500 animation controls, but Davy Sabbe did an awesome job of bringing all those shots to life. The Blur crew mocaped anything that moved remotely like a human: the Vinci Hero; the Vinci Grunts fleeing into the city and the Golems chasing them down. But the Scorpions, Clockworkmen, the Vinci Hero's Mech and Rukh's were all keyframed. Right around the time the studio crew was working on ‘Rise of Legends’, Blur sprung for new workstations for the studio. They're now working on Dual Opteron (Dual Core 2.4Ghz) processors, with 4GBs of RAM and NVIDIA Quadro 4500 Video Cards with 512Mb RAM. They hooked all the older boxes up to their farm which is now 600 processors strong. “If you add up all the rendered layers and test renders we pumped out on ‘Rise of Legends’ it totaled around 207,000 frames,” says Wilson. “Put back to back, that's roughly 143 minutes of renders, all for just a three-minute movie. We do try and pack a lot of shit into those shots.”

Dave Wilson: I really like that moment when the Vinci Hero's stares back at the hordes of Scorpion Riders about to attack, standing there with the Clockworkman's Gun, knowing he's going to eat it, but is going to take all them with him if he has to. Miller nicknamed that shot "Vinci Defiance", and I dig it. Kris Kaufman put that shot together. Corey Butler: I always liked the introduction shot of the Rukh's. I thought the shot looked amazing, even if Dave Wilson did it. I also like the shot where the Vinci Grunts are running back to the city and one of the Glass Golems steps on one of the Grunts then gets blown up by the mech's cannon, then camera pans over to reveal more of the Glass Golems. I thought it was a cool shot showing them storm the bridge. Kris Kaufman: I think my favorite confrontation is between the Vinci Hero and the Glass Golems. I love the impact of him ripping through their front line with that mech's cannon. On a side note the Vinci Mech is my favorite character. Iain did an incredible job on it. There's one Golem who rears back and chucks a shard of glass only to be met with a cannon round to the chest. I love that shot! Iain Morton: I like the shot where a Golem is about to bring his fist down on the Vinci Hero but a clockwork man blocks the blow at the last moment, with rocks and debris flying everywhere, FX courtesy of Mr. Riza. The sense of scale on these characters really comes across. “There is nothing like making some cool shit, blowing it all up and getting paid for it,” says Dave. “There is a great camaraderie at Blur. It feels like a big family, no hard and fast hierachy, if you have a cool idea, or you come up with some new lighting technique, even if it's just cool, it goes in the project. We started slow just with a few character modelers around in August/September and wrapped early January, with a nice break over Christmas, so all in all, the project probably took about five months. Towards the end, when we put a few late nights in, even those are great, the small core team at the end made for great late-night Quake games.” Clients also play a huge part in making the whole process enjoyable for the Blur crew and Wilson is adamant that Big Huge Games were amazing to work with. “They were very trusting from the outset and really just let us do what we do best,” he says. “They supplied us with every asset we could use and some really inspiring concept art. Their ingame stuff was so well done we were able to use a lot of it throughout the piece with minimal work to get it to hold up with the other high-resolution assets we built. They were just perfect clients! When we sent images over to Big Huge for approval Dave Inscore's emails were always great for keeping us up pumped, enthusiastic and spirits high!” is switching over to XSI for rigging and animation at the moment. This year’s short film, "A Gentleman's Duel", is actually Blur’s first project being fully animated in XSI and so far everything seems to be working great. They're still modeling, lighting and rendering in Max but just using XSI for animation. There were quite a few artists who jumped on the projects, but the lead artists were... Creative Director: Tim Miller, Blur founder CG Supervisor: Dave Wilson Animation Supervisors: Marlon Nowe, Jeff Weisend FX Supervisor: Kirby Miller Producer: Al Shier Assistant Producer: Debbie Yu CG and FX Leads: Corey Butler and Brandon Riza Layout Artist: David Nibbelin Blur Studio Rise of Legends Autodesk 3ds Max Softimage|XSI Watch 'Rise of Legends' (22MB mov) Interview: Paul Hellard Layout: Tim Downing