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In a cinematic sequence, the number one goal is the beauty of the imagery. Since this was their first PS3 project, it was difficult for Capcom to foresee the amount of work that would be required. For this reason, while developing DMC4, the team looked at titles that were being released by other companies and, learning from these, set new targets for themselves. By repeating this process, they rapidly improved the scene’s quality. Initially, their target was to use 60 FPS for the cut scenes too. But to make Kyrie look cute or Dante look cool, they had to adjust the lighting as required and so the volume of lighting grew. But while lighting improves the appearance of characters and the scene, it also increases the processing load. After seeing the progress of this work, director Hideaki Itsuno made the bold decision that if they could not create the cut scenes with satisfactory quality at 60 FPS, then they should use 30 FPS.
Softimage was used to create one such cut scene , where a single scene was used for each cut. Yuji Shimomura was asked to continue his work from DMC3 and direct each of these cuts. By first creating a pre-visualization with live-action video, it was easy for the team to understand the goal of the project, which in turn led to a smooth production process. The result is cut scenes with a good tempo that link together with the gameplay in an enjoyable way. Each cut is made up of several seconds of animation. The fact that the project could be divided among the team members for each cut made the workflow very efficient. Even though one cut is only a few seconds long, the background, character models and animation represent a considerable amount of data. Nevertheless the team said that even under such conditions, Softimage remained stable and smooth throughout.
Character ModelingAlthough DMC4 was highly significant in that it was Capcom's first PS3 title, elsewhere at the company, advance work had already started on a different project for a next-generation console. The DMC4 team used data from this other project as a reference for creating models, which enabled them to successfully finish the development without changing their initial target date. The actual data size, however, was three times that of the previous PS2 title. The average character model size, for example, increased from 5,000 to 15,000 polygons, while texture size increased from 256x256 to 1024x1024. Hiromitsu Kawashima was in charge of creating Nero and Dante, Naru Omori was in charge of creating Gloria and advertising materials, and Jun Ikawa was given the task of creating Kyrie. In all, nearly 100 different character types had to be created, including the main cast, enemies and ordinary citizens who appear in the cut scenes (such as old men and women, children, stout people, young paladins). But thanks to the non-destructive environment and intuitive modeling interface of Softimage, the work proceeded very smoothly. This flexible software allowed for changes at any stage; for example, the number of bones in models for ordinary citizens could be reduced, or the vertices edited even after weighting the completed models.
The team said that the characters’ model and texture data were used everywhere: in gameplay, cut scenes and advertisements. In other words, normal maps were used even for in-game models. When textures for these run-time rendered models were imported, they were used after being scaled down in real time. This enabled the effective use of hardware memory and fluid movement at 60 FPS. However, the textures were not blindly scaled down to a uniform size; rather, appropriate adjustments were made depending on the map type. For example, diffuse maps were scaled down to a 1/4 size, normal maps to ½ so they would not lose too much detail. In the PC version of the game that was released on July 24, the original 1024 x 1024 texture size is supported. DMC4 is next-generation entertainment, and as such it can be played on hardware with the most advanced specifications.
Fastest Motion in Gaming HistoryOne unavoidable problem when creating character animation is gimbal lock. When an animator tries to move an IK bone above a certain value, the chain rotates in a way that looks unnatural. Because stylized action is a major attraction of the Devil May Cry series, we asked the team how they avoided this problem with their high-speed motion.
Normally in Softimage, the rotation order is set as XYZ, but in DMC4, work is performed with a YXZ setting where the Y axis rotation is given priority. The team also used a mechanism to ensure that optimum envelope conditions are achieved when characters bend their fingers or knees.
Much-Loved Motion Rigs The team said that in past productions, work was very laborious because the rig structure and the number of models and bones were different for each model. For this reason, in DMC4 three key staff members came together to determine the optimal workflow. These were Jun Ikawa, in charge of modeler management and Kyrie; Hiroyuki Nara, in charge of motion management and Dante's player motion; and Takayasu Yanagihara, who set up the character and facial rigs and was in charge of cut scene management. Mr. Yanagihara explains that when the team started rig creation for DMC4, they had not yet finished any models. For this reason, they based the rigs on the body shape of Dante's model in the previous DMC3 production and then later performed a wide range of modifications. Rig workflow using Dante template Mr. Yanagihara himself created a script that automatically performed corrections to this template rig to make it compatible with characters with different hand, leg and body sizes. Scaling was performed manually, but only two adjustments were required, the first for the scale from the ground to the stomach and the second from the ground to the knees. When the script was executed, after these adjustments, a model with a controller was ready to go in about a minute—even when character sizes differed. This meant that the team could start to add motion to character models as soon as they were complete. Although the team used a large amount of motion capture data in the cut scenes, their goal was to work with Softimage and the Dante template only. With motion capture data, motion for specific characters is usually shot using specific actors, and then the animation data is created. Because the body sizes differ, reusing this data for various characters would require shooting the motion capture again for a new rig, or performing adjustments using functions such as motion retargetting.
To avoid this, Mr. Yanagihara requested that the captured data be delivered in a form suitable for the template rig. This meant that all captured data could be reused for all characters and that even if a character's model data had not yet been created, other team members could press ahead with the capture work. Of course, motion was at times also output to animation presets, so that a single click of the Export button was all that was needed to reuse it for another character . Re-using motion with the template rig This workflow, it turned out, had many unanticipated advantages. The first was that it allowed changes to be made to the model right up to the final stages of production. Usually, in game production no one is allowed to change elements such as hand length or leg length partway through the project. Although the bending of hands required adjustment, motions that did not involve sliding the legs could be adjusted automatically within a few minutes. This resulted in stress-free work for both modelers and animators. The second merit of this workflow was that it proved extremely efficient when team members had to import data from subcontractors into the in-house specifications. The Capcom team provided subcontractors with the same toolset and asked them to work according to the same workflow. However, on some rigs, a change was made to the template. In one instance a large-volume Null was added to this rig because an animator wanted to move the body of a character as the character had his hands on a desk.. However, this adjustment was simply output as an animation preset, usable with the template rig with one click of the Export button. Synoptic view for the template For hand control, the team used four more bones in the rig than in the previous title, for a total of 20 bones. The extra four bones were added to give a curved motion to the back of the hand during hand movements such as making a fist. When setting up hand animation, the team was able to use synoptic views and could also call up presets such as shapes for holding a gun or sword. They imported the default pattern and then performed detailed adjustments for the finger joints. Just as with the character rigs, synoptic views for the hands could be switched to any character with a simple tab operation. Even with so many different characters, this made it easy for the animators to create hand gestures unique to individual characters. The documentation on this workflow, which runs 50 pages, enabled both in-house and external designers to perform the best possible work in the shortest possible time. Easy-to-Develop Synoptic Views and ScriptsThe enormous scope of this project required the Capcom team to outsource a lot of work for both the game and the demo movie to external CG companies and freelancers. The Synoptic View funtionality turned out to be extremely useful for unifying the workflow between the in-house team and these external subcontractors. Game data are created under extremely strict conditions: if you get only a single value incorrect, the result will be completely different from what you intended. To avoid this problem, all the required functions were embedded as a script function within synoptic views, so that even Softimage beginners could work without making any mistakes. As such, the production environment was exactly the same for the in-house and external teams. This resource proved particularly valuable during motion creation, where one function automatically set animation keys as the animator operated the rig controller—no need even to open Explorer or Schematic. Another script allowed character body, hand or face movements to be set as presets and the data to be output to the PS3. Other automated processes were also created, such as adding noise to camera movements. When the Capcom team had been working on DMC3, they’d made good use of the powerful Softimage scripting capabilities. This accumulated scripting know-how proved invaluable during DMC4 production for solving problems the team hit. One serious problem, an error in the rig controller, cut the parent-child relationship so that movement in the buttocks area became unnatural. The modeling team had already finished dozens of models, and so had gone too far to redo them. Instead of scrapping all their work and starting again, the team gave the modelers and animators a script that performed the correction. In this way, the software’s expressions, constraints and scripts were extremely useful in enabling the team to create the type of productive workflow they were seeking. The Facial Animation challenge
If you take a look at the cut scenes, you'll see that emotions such as surprise are conveyed extremely convincingly through the facial animation. Mr. Kawashima created these animations, with Mr. Nara creating the presets, and Mr. Yanagihara creating the actual facial rigs. This team knew that facial animation would take an enormous amount of time, so they created various mechanisms to simplify the work and make it more efficient. In fact, for DMC4, they constructed a new system that was inspired by Autodesk Face Robot®. Facial setup Mr. Yanagihara says, "We used a three-stage system where about 30 markers, 150 bones and a separate slider could be used." The facial rig setup for the characters was automated in the same way as the template body rig. All the team had to do was import the rig and model, press a button and wait about a minute: the rig adjustment would be performed automatically to suit each face model. The result was then applied to the face model, enabling the facial animation settings to be performed immediately. In the same way, there was only one synoptic view type, so it could be switched to any character using a tab within the Synoptic View. So, how did the team create facial animation using these rigs and synoptic views? Manual setting for the nearly 150 animatable bones in a face model would have been very inefficient. Instead, they first developed sliders for controlling vowel sounds and emotions. By moving these sliders, they could generate rough facial animations. These sliders were also connected to the markers and the moving markers controlled the various bones in the surrounding area based on the set expressions. For example, when a marker was moved to close the corners of a mouth, the lips would bulge out before they shut. Or when a character’s point of focus changed, areas such as the eyebrows would move in tandem and the nostrils would flare, if appropriate. If the slider adjustments did not produce satisfactory results, the animator would perform further adjustments by adding marker offsets. If the adjustments were still not completely satisfactory after moving the marker again, he would make small adjustments by moving individual bones to control the expression. On the PS3, animations involving these 150 bones move at 30 FPS.
Other useful functions for facial editing were also developed, such as mirror-image reversal, and reversing the X axis only. The resulting high-quality facial animation was due in large part to Mr. Kawashima's hard work in adjusting the weighting on nearly 150 bones per character. He said that Softimage helped him enormously because its non-destructive environment meant that he did not have to start adding weights from scratch each time. Also, Softimage allowed him to add weight to only half of a character and then perform symmetry copy to finish the process. Large-scale Background ProductionThe world of DMC4 looks like a mix of Asia and Europe. This is in part because the team decided to go to Turkey to shoot materials. The main reason for the shoot was that Capcom's texture library, from the PS2 era, contained 256-resolution materials: too low-quality for what they were looking to achieve. As for the results of this shooting trip… well, take a look at the game and you'll find out. What you’ll see are superb depictions of buildings with a unique atmosphere; not quite Asia, but not quite Europe either. The shadows and textures are also exquisite. However, had they applied the real-time lighting process to all objects, the computational load would have become too heavy. So with the exception of certain scenes such as the jungle scene, the real-time shadow process was only used for the characters.
Capcom developed a technique for displaying pre-rendered results in the game using the integrated mental ray® renderer in Softimage. They were able to create light maps with Softimage for the background and surrounding objects and then use them in the game. The information from final gathering and ambient occlusion during renders could be baked into a light map, which was used to calculate vertex color.
In total, 56 new background scenes were created for DMC4. Combined with previously built backgrounds, there are 70 scenes in all, including transition scenes. Although the size of each scene was 300 MB to 400 MB, thanks to the Softimage® GigaCore architecture, smooth work was possible even in 32-bit environments.
FinallyIf you still haven't played Devil May Cry 4, at the very least you should check out the demo and benchmarks. You’ll be amazed that such beauty could be achieved through mere CG data. If you have played the game already, go back and take another look. After reading this article, you'll likely see the environments and characters in a different light. As you look again at the mosque-like building in the opening scene, or at the shadows and texture of the fountains, you’ll gain a whole new level of appreciation for the talented programmers and artists at Capcom, and the technology they use to create their games. The team that we interviewed
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