Splinter Cell: Blacklist

PROJECT PROCESS:
The cinematic process for this project was done using real-time cut-scenes. This meant that the process began as soon as the respective level designer had completed a basic white boxing of the area. Once that was complete I started adding the setup for a scene. At first this would include bringing in all characters and props that would be featured. Although the characters and props would often change as the process continued.

While waiting for mo-cap animations, the scenes still needed to function in game for testing and game flow purposes. To make sure the game flow was intact, I would setup the characters in a T-Pose with a basic camera that would act as a scene placeholder until further assets were ready. This made sure that while the level was being built, the player could still trigger a placeholder for the scene as well as skip that scene and continue playing. The placeholder would evolve over time into video captures of the motion capture shoot, raw motion capture animation and finally the animators more polished animation. The setups for each of these steps was built and maintained by myself.

Later into the project things like SFX, VFX, lights, and dialog would start to become available. It was my job to make sure that all of these things were setup and working accordingly in game. Setting up the timing and triggering of SFX and dialog was a regular thing that required constant tweaking depending on script changes and director decisions. VFX would be even more involved since it was my job to coordinate with the VFX artists in order to get the look and feel we needed for specific shots in a cinematic. This would often require myself to go in and create a custom effect based off the original if the cinematic required something a bit different. These effects were then added to the scene, placed, rigged, and triggered by myself. This would include things like explosions, bullet trails, muzzle flares, blood splatters and textures, rain, dust, and technology (scanners, projections, etc).

Lighting was finalized later in the project. After a lighting artist had finished their setup for a scene, their work would be handed to myself so that I could set up the triggering of every light specific to each camera shot in a cinematic. This process allowed us to achieve a very cinematic feeling throughout. Unfortunately cinematic lighting in real-time can take quite a toll on game performance. Another step to the lighting process was added later in order to resolve this. This required going frame by frame through each cut-scene in order to determine which shots had the lowest frames per second. I would then take data from those shots and input it into a separate program that listed which lights were on screen at that exact time. It would be possible to have one continuous shot with 10 lights active, but that doesn't mean they are all on screen at the same time. Step by step I would further tweak which lights were active on individual frames thus further improving performance.

Lastly, further scene optimizations are added as well as other cinematic effects such as support character video cut ins. Transitions from gameplay to cinematic and vice versa were also refined by myself and the respective level designer. Things like "black boxing" characters were added to enhance the performance further. This was actually an extra step I took upon myself because I was assigned the longest and heaviest scene in the game. This process involved me going through every shot and key framing unused characters into a volume beneath the level map. This volume would then temporarily unload the characters from memory until I needed to key frame them back into another shot.