A Arte de Se Exprimir: Game trailer, o melhor de 2011 segundo a Stash

segunda-feira, 2 de janeiro de 2012

Game trailer, o melhor de 2011 segundo a Stash

Continuando na minha procura de diferenciar o que de melhor foi feito em 2011, passo agora para os trailers de vídeojogos. Nutro uma predileção muito particular por esta categoria, porque creio que se consegue muitas vezes criar no trailer uma emoção que estipula se vamos ou não gostar do jogo. Porém, muitas vezes acontece como nos trailers de cinema, ficamos desiludidos.

Independentemente disso, creio que a Stash fez mais uma vez uma excelente escolha do que melhor foi feito ao longo de 2011.

Começamos então por Assassin's Creed: Revelations (2011). Dizem-nos os intervenientes no processo de construção

"There are a lot of time-warps in the fighting scenes - at certain points with extremely slowed down motions - that posed a great technical challenge due to the large number of characters and numerous simulated elements. Also, the scene where we see Ezio on the sea made us face several problems, since our rendering pipeline went through a lot of changes lately and accordingly our previous tools that served us well before couldn't be used anymore.

"In asset creation we use Maya, 3ds Max, ZBrush, Bodypaint and Photoshop - the first two are supported by many in-house plug-ins. The scenes are assembled in Maya, the same software we use for animation. For rendering we use Arnold and the completed layers are 'polished together' in Nuke. It is very useful that the features of Maya are adjustable; we can broaden the variety of functions by adding or replacing the existing plug-ins with our own solutions, so we can say that Maya serves mainly to provide the technical framework in our pipeline. When we chose the software for rendering and compositing, the final decision was based upon the software's dependability and ability to perform robustly in a large-scale production environment.

ASSASSIN'S CREED: REVELATIONS

Game trailer 3:05
Game developer:
UBISOFT
Director:
ISTVÁN ZORKÓCZY
Animation:
DIGIC PICTURES
www.digicpictures.com

A seguir passamos para Dead Island (2011). Este game trailer acaba por ser o meu preferido do ano transato. Alem da excelente qualidade gráfica, adorei a irreversibilidade da narrativa no tempo e espaço, bem como a música que o acompanha e que me emocionou muito.

Também nos dizem os intervenientes no processo de construção: "There were a number of technical challenges most of which revolve around creating realistic CGI characters that don't fall into the 'uncanny valley'. We cast real actors and captured their facial performance using 4D surface scanning rather than traditional optical marker techniques. That was the easy bit, the hard task for our Pipeline TD's was working out how we take that surface 3D data and drive our characters faces. We are delighted with those results.

"Another area that was technically challenging was using reverse slow motion. This threw up a whole additional set of considerations; for example we had to add full cloth simulation to all characters because the nature of that type of photography requires proper cloth sims to keep the clothes from looking stiff and fake."

DEAD ISLAND

Game trailer 3:00
Client:
DEEP SILVER
Director:
STU AITKEN
Animation:
AXIS ANIMATION
www.axisanimation.com

Finalmente temos o que para mim era o mais desconhecido, mas que também se destaca por excelente qualidade gráfica. Estou a falar de Age of Empires Online (2011). Colorido e tecnicamente bastante bem conseguido. A equipa por detrás do seu desenvolvimento referem: "Working with director Dana Dorian, from our little sister company Flaunt, the Axis team created this trailer for Age of Empires Online based on original scripts from LA agency Ayzenberg which Dana and the Ayzenberg team refined and tweaked during pre-production.

"Luckily Dana had spent many an hour playing the Age of Empires games over the years so getting to grips with the world and its characters was easy. Don't forget to look out for the guy with the enormous steak!"