Rendering a short film using a game engine

Ravenok

Hey everyone!

I've been posting a lot lately, with a lot of technical questions..
That's because I'm nearing the end of my studential life and I'm getting a ton of responsibility on my shoulders, and I gotta answer many questions to myself and my friends. This forum's been a home for me and I'm very grateful for everything! So many awesome people and such a great community... It's the best.

But I do have more to figure out.

Right now we're working on our 3rd year project, a 3:30 minute short which will be rendered using mental ray or vray.

But already I've started thinking about my 4th year project, on which I'll have to start working as early as this july, so I wanna get ready for it.

I'm toying with the option of making our 4th year project a fully game-engine-rendered short. Since I'm building myself to be a game artist this is also the logical thing to do, I guess. And also, I think it's time I learned how to use a proper game engine to test out my stuff.

I imagine the options would be either Unreal or Cryengine. But I lack any real knowledge and would love to hear some advice and tips - I wanna start learning what I need to know.

The film we'll make will be somewhere between 5 to 10 minutes, hopefully more toward the former.
Any recommendation? Did anyone hear of similar projects being made that I could look at and learn from?

Thanks and sorry for the wall of text!

gsokol

So are you looking to do it shot by shot? Like where you pick a shot, do all the animation, capture it, then rinse and repeat and composite it all together? Or are you looking into doing a long cutscene, where all the animations, camera changes, etc...are triggered at runtime?

At my job, we have to do a lot of the latter. I use Unity, and control the sequences with Playmaker, which is an FSM editor that you can get in the asset store for a hundred bucks. Its like a simpler version of Kismet.

Ravenok

Well basically yeah, it'll be based on many shots. That's similar to how we're doing it now. We just build the sets, and when we need to animate a scene we load up the set, animate the scene, and save it as a scene file which will go to rendering later.

Scenes COULD be long though.

Would you recommend unity?
Could you show me a few examples of good looking cut scenes made with unity?

One thing I'm hesitant about when using a game engine is dynamics and particle effects. The few we will use will need to look pretty good and fluent, which is a problem with game engines when you don't really master the area.

Basically I'm just trying to make up whether or not it's a good thing to do. It's very exciting for me to thing about it, but it really has to look good for us to go through with it. I know models can look great and I know animation can work well if you don't worry about framerate and just use the engine as another rendering engine, but when it comes to dynamics/particles I'm totally in the dark.

sprunghunt

you can do this in unreal pretty easily. It's got a full suite of cinematic tools.

And since you're not actually making gameplay you can use a lot of pre-baked animation instead of dynamics.

Ravenok

How complicated is the learning process for such a thing is?

I mean, how long should it take for me to learn UDK well enough to pull off something like a high quality cinematic?

Computron

There is a great eat3d dvd that can get you up to speed in a day of work. Hourences made it.

megalmn2000

Making a short movie in CryEngine 3 is possible.

--> http://cryenginefilmtools.blogspot.com/

Some awesome screenshots from CryEngine 3 movie --> http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=747906

Ravenok

Hourences's DVD seems to really be great for me. Also the cryengine shots are AMAZING! And I saw some eat3d dvds on those too.

This is awesome. I got a ton to go through now, thanks for all the info