'Diablo' Cinematic Project
polycounter lvl 8
Hello everyone!
So it's now been around 3 months since I finished my Maruader Project, and it's now time for me to go back to school and I've been lucky enough to persuade my teacher onto letting me do a personal project once again. So now it's on!
So, what is this?
This project is first and foremost NOT an in-engine rendered cinematic and it's not lowpoly with normalmaps. My big dream is to work with the Blizzard Cinematics team that does all the pre-rendered cinematics for their games. I'm tailoring my portfolio for game related VFX.
My plan is to make a prerendered cinematic related to the Diablo universe somehow and hopefully in the end catch the attention of Blizzard.
It's my first go around doing an animated cinematic by myself, so it's gonna be a challenge and fun!
I'm basing the entire cinematic around this piece of Diablo 3 concept art by an unknown Blizzard artist:
The plan
The project is a school project, and therefor it will have a hard deadline(the 16th of December). So I've decided to somehow limit myself in by only making what people would refer to as a teaser. I'm aiming for around 10-12 seconds of 3d renders, but it should also feature some green screen footage with a matte painting.
The production of everything will start tomorrow(the 10th of October), so that's when I start posting the progress. I've done some R&D on different subjects related to what I want to end up with. Forexample the candles and how to do them efficiently in 3d.
I'll start posting storyboards etc. as soon as I've made them.
I look forward to the project and the result, and hopefully Polycount will help me make it as good as possible
So it's now been around 3 months since I finished my Maruader Project, and it's now time for me to go back to school and I've been lucky enough to persuade my teacher onto letting me do a personal project once again. So now it's on!
So, what is this?
This project is first and foremost NOT an in-engine rendered cinematic and it's not lowpoly with normalmaps. My big dream is to work with the Blizzard Cinematics team that does all the pre-rendered cinematics for their games. I'm tailoring my portfolio for game related VFX.
My plan is to make a prerendered cinematic related to the Diablo universe somehow and hopefully in the end catch the attention of Blizzard.
It's my first go around doing an animated cinematic by myself, so it's gonna be a challenge and fun!
I'm basing the entire cinematic around this piece of Diablo 3 concept art by an unknown Blizzard artist:
The plan
The project is a school project, and therefor it will have a hard deadline(the 16th of December). So I've decided to somehow limit myself in by only making what people would refer to as a teaser. I'm aiming for around 10-12 seconds of 3d renders, but it should also feature some green screen footage with a matte painting.
The production of everything will start tomorrow(the 10th of October), so that's when I start posting the progress. I've done some R&D on different subjects related to what I want to end up with. Forexample the candles and how to do them efficiently in 3d.
I'll start posting storyboards etc. as soon as I've made them.
I look forward to the project and the result, and hopefully Polycount will help me make it as good as possible
Replies
I'll look really close to your thread and hopefully I'll have you some good critics to give you
Have fun and good luck !
Good luck !
While I'm not the best concept artist in the world, I managed to come up with a storyboard that I think illustrates what I want to do in the this little cinematic teaser.
If anything doesn't make sense, please do tell!
Onward to some different concept art of the pieces.. I'll also put together a little moodboard of different inspirations/reference images I've found.
edit: updated storyboard
Oh and arrows are cool, like a arrow from where the silhoutte person enters.
Good point! I'll incorporate some motion into it, the idea is that everything almost is one long camera animation
edit: updated to storyboard.
Some more stuff, slowly getting into the rhytm
Keep it up !
Yeah it's just a warm up, getting a feel for the project while I'm doing some basic problem solving in my head and consulting different people about techniques that will help me achieve this in a very short deadline.
My plan is to start doing proxy meshes and an animatic either from thursday and maybe a little bit in the weekend. Once that is down, I'll start pumping out assets!
[ame="
Already got some feedback on it, but if you guys have anything, feel free to post it, I will do a sweep of it at some point tomorrow.
edit: A friend of mine suggested I might break up the long camera walk up towards the window with some flashbacks in best blizzard style. The main problem with my animatic is that it isn't really telling a story. I could use the flash backs to do some cheap narrating. Thoughts?
edit 2: I'm thinking about having the flashbacks be something like this:
1 - You see the interior of the tower where a shadow gets projected up onto the wall by the candles, and then you see the shadow drawing a weapon.
2. You hear some struggeling and when its done, you focus on a candle where the flame gets blown out.(cheap symbolic animation, but I think it would help sell the idea of a person getting killed)
You could make a second window at the bottom/middle of the tower, where, when the camera goes by, you could see few shadows of warriors (or demons?) running upstairs.
Then you could play a narrator voice on top of the video (if you are able to record a nice voice) who could say a few words just to let the spectator wonder, like "I did that.. blah blah..but I should have known the would kill me.."
Then, once the camera has reached the top window, you introduce the shadow thing with the sword or/AND? the candles turning off ?
It would be like a magician being executed by humans or killed by demons ?
Anyway, keep it up !
Looks nice so far!
@Cremuss, thanks for the ideas. I'll keep them in mind as I work on the animatic here in the weekend
@Kdogma, good idea. I actually had an idea at some point to use the diablo 3 logo.. but I'm not sure if I should do that.
@Paenescu.Daniel, I think the flashbacks would help break that up and make the story richer
@Nitewalkr, me neither :-)
[ame="
Anyways great job so far. I'll be keeping my eye on this. Good luck.
I am not trying to say that your visuals "arent stunning", but I am telling you that the designs/forms/scenes and overall pacing of the video seems very loose and the story seems to go anywhere my mind wants to?
At this point you'd benefit the most from having music.... not sure if you have it or if my sound wasnt working properly? but doing cuts on the music would improve the feeling of the beatboard
Also, Blizzard never puts the title of their project at the beginning of the cinematic, nor do they hold on it for 10 seconds. Dont do that. Put you title screen either after the "set up" shot (the first shot) or on the last frames.
Other than that, you need to work on communicating a visual narrative.... everything builds up to looking in to a window, and once I finally do, nothing appears to be awesome or memorable.
Finally, the less cuts you use, the better off you'll be. Take this with a grain of salt, as its completely subject... as is my entire critique.
Good luck
@Limewax, thanks for your honest feedback! I can see there are some holes in my animatic and I'm in the progress of figuring out how to resolve it.
Anyways, so I'm gonna put the animatic on hold until I get some ideas on how to fix the problems. While we are waiting I've made my skull basemesh that I'm about to put into zbrush for some wear and tear and also some proportion fixing.
Looks good
I don't have much to say except that the crack looks strange to me. It Seems that the wave frequency is too high or something ?
Anyway keep it up !
The candle shader is in a very early stage
Reason why I haven't updated in a while is cause I had to change the project in order to meet the deadline and actually focus on what I'm good at.
So, here's the deal:
The project has been changed to depict a lieutenant of sin, one of Azmodan's(the lesser evil featured in the Black Soulstone cinematic) council and the one of the creatures you see sitting on their throne and 'weeping' smoke.
So I've been working on the design and zbrush part of the lieutenant, and at the moment I'm here:
I'll do a quick storyboard and some general ideas when I get home and have acces to my work PC
oddball anyone? :P looks great man!
also, it seems you made him thinnner than in earlier version. he looked better with broader arms imo.
My reference mainly comes from pics of Diablo himself I've found around the internet and also the lietuenants of sin that the Diablo Black soulstone cinematic feature @ 1:34:
[ame="
(you can also soo some Zbrush renders of them in the Making of panel from Blizzcon 2011)
The reason why I made him so 'thin' and fragile looking is because his role in the demon army is actually a council for Azmodan, so he will do nothing but sit down on the throne, and I actually found it hard to design a demon that ain't a brute and rely on their muscles, so I guess it's inevitable that I ended up with something very alien like. With that being said, there are design elements about him I'm not completly satisfied with, but the deadline makes sure I have no time to go about and fixing everything, so I gotta stick with what I got at the moment and hopefully my post and environment will make up for it. :-)
Most demons in the cinematic from blizzard have some characteristic feature, maybe something to have a look at.
Awesome project, you're doing great. I'm very interested in your progress. Good luck!