CGSociety

{digg}


Unveiled at the annual blockbuster games expo, E3 in Los Angeles, and via a featured online exclusive at Gamespot.com, the trailer for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 features an artful mix of motion capture and keyframe animation created at Plastic Wax for the eagerly anticipated sequel to Relic's fast-paced RTS game.

Nathan Maddams, Creative Director and Plastic Wax company founder, contributed heavily, starting with the clients script and guiding the team from storyboards and sequence development through to final render. ?

"We worked closely with Games Workshop and Relic to realize their vision. Creating a more visceral world than the last, whilst still owing to the previous trailer and titles fast-paced action and entertainment.?Because it was such a major showcase at E3 with THQ we wanted to completely up the ante on every aspect."

With a team of veteran animators?skilled in both mocap and keyframe animation, Plastic Wax?chose to use a combination of hand key and motion capture to bring these characters to life.?Plastic Wax used its own Vicon Motion Capture facility for a majority of the Dawn of War 2 characters, although the Dreadnought sequence is totally animated by hand.?

"We paid a lot of attention to detail with the animation, a lot of planning went in to characters regarding which ones were to be mocapped and which ones to be keyframed. All the time making sure both styles sit side by side."

"Its great having our own mocap rig here so we can do R&D at any time and come up with different ways of doing things," he said. “The mocap rig was used to capture facial animation with the animators blending multiple takes to capture the timing.”

"For the Warp Spider, we had a mocap session with a gymnast but it didn't quite work as they were too light on their feet, so we used a martial artist for the runs and the combat moves, then a stunt performer for the falls and impacts and another actor for facial. It would be nice to find one person to do it all but the good thing is we can divide performances."

Relic provided a lot of in-game assets for both use and reference material. The models that were used for the animation provided a good base but had to be significantly up-rezzed for the feature.

Tyrone Maddams, texture artist and modeling, character art lead worked closely with Games Workshop and Relic to ensure that the characters’ look and feel was just right. As character lead he was able to work with the clients feedback and offer a lot of creative guidance in getting the characters' look just right.

As Texture Lead, Tyrone was kept busy creating all the different states for each character: normal, damaged, blood spattered, burnt, etc. "For the warp spider we did extra FX passes for damage and blood. We took live images of blood splatter and worked them into the textures in Photoshop CS3 using a Wacom tablet.”

The bulk all the effects work was done in 3ds Max using Particle Flow and a set of plug-ins. Afterburn was used to make almost all the smoke and volumetrics and Digimation Lightning for the lighting magic of the Farseer.

PFlow Tool Box Extensions and FumeFX were also used as well as some simple animated textures.
Houdini was used to animate the rocks in the scene where the Dreadnought smashes through the wall.

All the footage was composited in Shake and then edited in Final Cut Pro. Our workstations have a minimum of 4GB RAM, Intel Quad-Cores and powered by NVIDIA Quadro Effects cards.

All the pre-production, storyboarding and creative planning for the Dawn of War 2 cinematic was provided by Plastic Wax.

The Space Marine Sergeant was a memorable character. Tyrone employed a number of techniques to achieve the specific look Relic was after.

"We started with a fairly young looking Sergeant base, slowly working in wrinkles, large pores, facial stubble and variation in skin tone and colour.

ZBrush was employed in?parallel?to compliment the texture treatment?and further define the Serg's character, from a grunt to a battle hardened veteran.

Beyond that a lot of late nights were spent looking through horrible reference for the burns and further blood spatter but paid off in the end"

Plastic Wax is a leading digital design, 3D art, animation and production studio specializing in the creation of premium digital entertainment, 3D art and animation for the global entertainment and gaming industries.