Making pre-rendered animation look like a game engine?

DigitalDilettante

Hey, I'll try to keep this short and coherent.
I'm meeting up with some film makers tomorrow afternoon who are interested in creating a short Tv/cinema advert for a charity that works to help soldiers with Post-traumatic stress disorder. They are thinking about a concept in which a retired soldier is seen playing a video game (an FPS shooter, like Call of Duty), and having the game suddenly blending into the soldier fighting in an actual battlefield scene shot in live footage. Thus illustrating the feeling someone may experience with post-traumatic stress disorder.

They are looking for advice on how the shots of the video game could be achieved. I expect that creating a pre-rendered animation within 3DsMax/Maya would be the most appropriate method for this, allowing for greater control over different angles and animations. My only fear is that it may be so obvious that its pre-rendered, that it will lose the feeling of a video game.

(tl;dr) SO after all that, I need some ideas and tips in how to render out something that looks like it is within a game engine, but is actual pre rendered animation?

Much thanks in advance.

Sandro

Games are getting more and more eye-candy nowadays. General picture holds pretty well usually, it's little details (sharp edge or blurry texture here, lack of contact shadow or proper antialiasing there) that give it away.

What game engines usually lack is soft area shadows, accurate GI & ambient occlusion (that is not baked in textures), general texture resolution, true reflections (tools and techniques to fake them are doing pretty good job though) and anti-aliasing & motion blur are often sub-par. You'll also see some jagged realtime shadows here and there, but I suspect they won't be around for long.

Rest is pretty much choosing the look you are aiming for and deconstructing it. Crysis and Call of Duty have very different looks and they feel different.

mdeforge

Hm, like everything it can be done in a lot of different ways. The way I immediately thought of though would be to use current FPS's as reference and create the best prerender you can. The trick though would be to include green screen like areas in the prerender so you can then take those frames, put it into After Effects, and dub in what you want from real footage.

For example, you can green screen in actual sky instead of CG sky. Anything grass or dirt may be hard because you have to film from the same height, but other than that it shouldn't be too bad. Sounds like a cool project.

DigitalDilettante

Sandro:
Thanks for the tips! and your right games are looking a lot more similar to pre-renders anyway. Would of been tough to have done this a few years ago :P. Just running some tests with lighting at the moment to see if I can create a blocky, low quality effect.

Stradigos:
Sounds like some cool tricks, but I don't think they will be needing anything too complicated in regards to the merging of the video game animation and real footage. I think they are going to be two separate entities with some sort of transition from one to the other. A complete 3D copy of the real world set will need to be made though so that sky idea might well come in handy! Thanks

Sandro

Using lower res shadow maps on lights instead of raytraced shadows will give you some of that jaggedness =D Also, getting rid of antialiasing, using speculars instead of glossy reflections and replacing any kind of GI solution you might have with draft quality final gather might give you that "game engine" kind of look you can expand on.

Justin Meisse

Have you looked into doing it in UDK? I did a quick search and there's a command line argument called DUMPMOVIE which will dump each frame to a directory, I saw someone mention combining that with -benchmark to lock the framerate at 30fps but this UDN link actually lists a -fps command so you could lock it to 24fps for film.

UDN link

DigitalDilettante

Justin_Meisse: Yes doing it within an actual engine was something I was wondering about, but I think my own limitations would probably make it unfeasible. I only really have experience with getting assets in and creating levels in UDK and Unity, I don't know anything about animation, character rigging or camera control in them. Not to mention all the other things like particle effects to create explosions and smoke and all that good stuff. Though it is something I'll mention to them tomorrow, creating it in an engine would likely look more authentic but would require pretty much making a functioning game for a few seconds of screen time.

Also quick test I was playing around with a game asset. Reckon it looks like it could be screen grab from engine? Good tip for the shadows and spec btw Sandro.

EarthQuake

Yeah, UDK would offer an "authentic" look, but it would also likely require a team of people with specific experience using it to pull it off in a reasonable amount of time.