MMO-Champion Feed - BlizzCon 2017 - Junkertown: The Plan - Creating a New Kind of Overwatch Animation

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BlizzCon 2017 - Junkertown: The Plan - Creating a New Kind of Overwatch Animation
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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