Valve Teams with 9 Director for Animated Movie
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http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/08/valve-teams-with-9-director-for-animated-movie
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120608005157/en
A film produced on a game engine hmm.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120608005157/en
A film produced on a game engine hmm.
Replies
Reminds me of Crytek's Sandbox for Cinema. I hope it works well so switching between movie and games industries can become less of a hassle for at least someone.
This sounds like an awesome collaboration, I look forward to seeing what comes of it.
I wonder why they chose Source to do this in, It's got to be the least user friendly engine out there. not that im saying it isnt capable.. it just seems like an animation studio would choose something more artist orientated.
They're pretty notorious for outsourcing lots of the work to India though, hopefully this project is mostly done in-house, sounds very interesting.
My hunch is that those shorts have been as much about behind-the-scenes work refining the artist-friendliness of the art pipeline to bring it up into competition with CE3 and UDK, as they have been about anything else.
When you have freaking Bay Raitt on staff, your animation tools - hell, your ART tools - don't suck for very long.
http://vimeo.com/38902280
But I guess I'll have to give them the biggest benefit of the doubt until the final film is out.
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I didn't think the teaser looked that bad. It's certainly a far cry from the big boys of the CG animated movie scene, but there's plenty of worse low budget CG films that pop up on straight to video. I don't imagine he's actually intending for this to be a mainstream cinema release.
He does need to find a much, much better solution for his CG water if this is going to be an undersea adventure movie.
Nice stuff, Tully
Considering how constipated the engine tools are, either Valve has been hoarding user-friendly versions, or someone convinced the director after plying him with copious amounts of alcohol.
it looks... interesting, but very rough. There's potential at least.
I agree it looks pretty rough... It's hard to tell what is underwater and above. Most of it looks foggy with particles floating around that could either be ash. I think if they could work out a better under water effect it would improve it quite a bit.
Unless you count a somewhat functional leaked version from the TF2 beta from '07.
I also noticed Ambient Occlusion which is something new for Source.
Ambient Occlusion has been in Source since Alien Swarm at least. It might have even been there in the L4D2 branch.
Anyway, everyone saying that it's not up to par because of the engine is full of nuts. Have you seen the TF2 shorts? Have you seen the L4D2 opening video? These guys are using the same tools that they used to make those, so it's either that it's a huge WIP still or that the artists/direction just aren't doing a great job.
Yeah I really hope that these are just WIPs
EDIT: Never mind, I saw the teaser. Yeah that latest video is clearly pre-vis, not that the 'finished' look is much better. Pity bout the quality of animation on display here
They're using it to render out the movie too using Source Filmaker, the same way that Valve did it for all of the TF2 shorts and the L4D2 opening videos.
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Whoa, nice!
Wonder how complicated it is to get your own (rigged) assets in there though.