Worked hard on that video breakdown for the Playsense agency. Thanks for the all feedback! And thanks to my friends from GESTALT.PROMO for that awesome Acid Storm track, by Roklum!
SHATTERLINE STORY
This story is about awards-winning project. We worked with impressive creative concepts from our partners. The main task was to involve the player by highlighting three sides of the Shatterline lore conflict. Below you can see how this story grew.
Hammer Creative Storyboards.
CONCEPT ART
The clear concept allowed our supervisor to run the development process simultaneously, otherwise, it would be impossible to do such a project in time with the required quality. We knew exactly who our main heroes were, what would happen in the key events, and even how they would look. Our art department helped us to find the look & feel of this story. That was a unique investment that literally allowed us "to catch the unicorn". Many thanks for the amazing works and sensitive art direction of such an amount of content!
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
The Shatterline characters have fascinating qualities for a game engine. They could close our tasks for the Full Shots, but for the Close-Ups that weren't enough, especially when you know that they have to deliver some actions and feelings. Our team recreated some of the main characters from the Shatterline game for this story.
We also created the main antagonist - Alan Seer. While developing Alan's look, our concept artists did some fantastic research. I literally can't show all the concepts, because there were an insane amount of variants and iterations, but that was only the beginning of Alan’s birth.
Extreme Close-Up shot for Alan's vision idea. It wasn’t the easiest task.
LOOK DEV
Besides the characters, hard to count how many assets were delivered to this project. To cut the story short, I'm going to show the standard look dev process that we did for each of them. Some of the assets were done from scratch, others were improved according to the story and pipeline requirements.
ENVIRONMENT
In the early pre-production stage, our in-house hero did some concepts with the assets. The raw scene was assembled in Blender where we tested some concept ideas and the most interesting and potential assets. They were dramatically improved in the further steps depending on the camera view, otherwise, it would be too expensive to support such an amount of content.
Terrific!
Below you can see how the locations look in the development stage. Almost all objects are instances, it means that one object could be copied as instances many times, but it would be stored in memory once. It allowed us fluently work with such an amount of content and saved tons of render time as well.
CAMERA & TRANSITIONS
The language of this story is the smooth movements of the camera that travels between different scenes and connects them through common elements like glue. Here are some transition examples that our team did.
Crystals refractions looked so cool that this element literally became a visual accent of this project.
MOTION CAPTURE
The action scenes were not as long as they were in the teaser, but they were massive, and we had only one shooting day. At a certain point, we realized we wanted to be 100 percent realistic, that’s why we found airsoft shotguns, which were very similar to what we needed. They definitely made it more difficult for the actors to move, but as the end result made everything more plausible. I'm really grateful to our motion capture actors who were ready for this challenge!
CHARACTER ANIMATION
The next step was polishing all that data, and our team did it with passion! Our animators literally filled digital heroes with the right feelings and even added some extra movements to their props. Such small details couldn't be visible to your eyes till you find them, but in general, such an exclusive artist's investment helps your brain to notice the realism in a digital picture.
VISUAL EFFECTS
There were a few important themes that we had to highlight with some cool VFX. The "Strafe" event, the infection & the v-gen cure, and the special abilities of our heroes, of course. That was the main accent where VFX artists tried to do their best, and they did.
The apocalyptic "golden hour". My favorite part of such stories. After this moment - the world will never be the same.
LIGHTING & COMPOSITING
The common task in the digital graphic is to make the unbelievable - believable. And the cheapest way to do this - is the right way. The more iterations you do the better quality will be, but something could always go out of control. As an example, below you can see the rendered iteration of one of the NY battle scenes shot.
The "flickering" crosswalk!
Thanks to the composition artists who implemented all hot patches, and scrupulously worked with each pixel. Usually, colors are important as a visual and semantic accent, and compositing is the cheapest way to find the final look of your story. As an example, below you can see some art-direction comments and the final result of this shot.
The last panoramic sequence was done with a great deal of the Nuke magic!
MUSIC AND SFX
To deliver the right feelings, or even say something that going on behind the screen often the music and SFX are all you need. And of course, you should hear what you see, and the balance of those sounds - is the sound design that our composer tried to save all the way while the project grew. As for the music, it was written especially for this story, you wouldn't find that mood anywhere else. And that's what we got in the end!
I want to thank Dmitry Lutsko and all our colleagues, who forced ideas that made the picture shine. Also thanks to everione for letting me share such an amount of backstage content. I hope you liked this article and maybe even found something useful for yourself. Don't miss the previous one about the Shatterline Teaser, where I'm focusing more on the directing and pre-production stages.
And thanks for your time!
AWARDS
CREDITS
Client manager: Nikolay Popov
Director: A. Liustsiber
CG Supervisor: Andrey Bogdanovich
Pipeline & Tech TD: Alexandr Antoshuk
Art Director: Konstantin Brailov
Concept art: Konstantin Brailov, Aleksey Kozyrev, Maksim Vorontsov, Ruslan Arbuzov, Viyaleta Radkevich, Andrey Kotnev, Sergey Dorohin, Igor Homich, Pavel Zayats, Anton Chernoskutov, Aleksey Davydovskiy
DOP: Konstantin Brailov
Camera: Konstantin Nalobin, Dzmitry Halavach, Andrei Andrushevich, Vyacheslav Cho-Din-Cho, Oleg Patonich
VFX: Nikolay Skolkov, Andrei Baranau, Andrei Andrushevich
Modeling, Texturing, Grooming: Ilya Klishin, Dzmitry Udovenko, Tykhon Stepanchenko
Environment, Lighting, Rendering: Aleksey Kozyrev, Andrei Andrushevich, A. Liustsiber, Yurii Kirnarskyi, Tykhon Stepanchenko, Dzmitry Lutsko
Mocap TD: Konstantin Nalobin
Rigging: Konstantin Nalobin, Pavel Kotlyar
Character setup: Konstantin Nalobin, Ilya Klishin, Dzmitry Udovenko
Animation: Konstantin Nalobin, Pavel Kotlyar, Nikita Ratnikov, Dzmitry Lutsko
Compositing: Konstantin Brailov, Vyacheslav Cho-Din-Cho, Oleg Patonich, Dzmitry Halavach, Vova Reshetnik, Yurii Kirnarskyi, Andrei Andrushevich
CC: Dzmitry Halavach
Compositor & Sound Design: Eugene Suhovei
Mocap actors: Alexandr Geleisha, Bogdan Osipenko, Alexandr Petrenko, Elena Goryanina, Alexandr Shulkevich, Alexey Olehnovich.
SPECIAL THANKS
Wargaming, Playsense, Frag Lab, Hammer Creative, Mocap One, VAL Studio, Actionscool.
Thanks to Dmitry Popok for the inventory, Nikolay Popov for the constructive article feedback, and Daria Ivanchyk for the proofreading.
