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  1. #1
    Yoshi P
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    Gorefiend

    How long does it take to make 3D Cinematics?

    Title says it all I guess, but if you don't know what I'm talking about think of the movies that play when FFXI start or WoW.

  2. #2

  3. #3

    Depends on the quality youre shooting for, length, how many models you have to make, etc. But in general a long time.

  4. #4

    Depends on how many polygons and textures your making your PC render lol

    One single frame on my PC can take anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple of hours ranging from shapes to high poly scenes with lighting/shadows/etc.

  5. #5

    Something like Cars FF movie takes years.

  6. #6
    Yoshi P
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    Well I mean a short one, like the WoW opening cinematics, or the FFXI opening cinematics. That quality, and that length of time.

  7. #7

    For that length?

    A long time.

    For that quality?

    A really long time.

  8. #8
    Yoshi P
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    lol I know it takes a long time my friend was just asking me...so do you think it takes about a month to make something of their quality, or more like 6 months? A year?

  9. #9

    Depends on the size of team. My guess is around 3 months with around 20-30 people. But thats a rough estimate based on approximately nothing.

  10. #10
    Chram
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    Well heres the thing. For one person, it takes an extraordinary amount of time to really do anything of decent quality in CGI.

    You've got to think about everything you have to do. You've got to do character models, environmental models, build everything from scratch. The more experience you have the quicker you can do things. But the sheer amount of work is astonishing. After you get a single character built, you've got to do a bone structure for him, define joints and which way they can pivot, all ranges of motion.

    After that you've got textures.

    Once you've got everything built and textured, from there you've got to animate it. Which once again depending on your experience can take a very long time.

    Now once you're done animating, a big pain in the ass is rendering. That can take, and depending on your quality, is very likely to take days upon days for a decent sized movie.

    I'd say to make the opening WoW cinematic, it took a team of people about 4-6 months.

    edit: I was thinking of a team size of about 10-20.

    Oh yeah, lighting and cameras, need to do that stuff after you've animated it. Because not only are you actually making the characters move, but you need to light it and move the cameras around to capture the range of activity that you're looking for in a specific shot.

  11. #11
    I Am, Who I Am.
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    Once you have wireframes and the basic animation, its pretty easy after that.

  12. #12
    blax n gunz
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    Companies like Square-Enix also tend to write their own Tools for 3D rendering and animation, which adds to the complexity and timeline of their products.

    Not sure if Blizzard does as well, but it wouldn't surprise me. Check the 'credits' for WoW and look for a "Tools Team" credit.

    Almost everyone else uses a commercial product like Lightwave (800 bucks) or Maya (lolyoucan'taffordit) to do the heavy lifting once all the artwork is worked out.

    It's been widely reported that by far the most time-consuming part is the artwork production. Takes a month or two at least for that much work, if you can break it down by each noticable detail in the opening cinematics you're watching.

  13. #13

    I remember messing around in 3dStudioMax in high school. I made 4 balls and a nifty textured background. I put a reflect/refract skin on them and then added 2 light sources. I made them all reflect/refract off each other and started the render.

    6 days later my scene was done.

    I think I remember reading somewhere about the CGI machines that helped make the Final Fantasy movie and it took them over 6 months of non stop rendering to get it done. And that was like hundreds of CGI machines.

  14. #14
    Yoshi P
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    Okay this is justwhat I was asking, thanks alot guys !

  15. #15
    Black Belt
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tape
    I remember messing around in 3dStudioMax in high school. I made 4 balls and a nifty textured background. I put a reflect/refract skin on them and then added 2 light sources. I made them all reflect/refract off each other and started the render.

    6 days later my scene was done.

    I think I remember reading somewhere about the CGI machines that helped make the Final Fantasy movie and it took them over 6 months of non stop rendering to get it done. And that was like hundreds of CGI machines.
    Yeah, that's called a cluster. To make a film like that, it takes a long, long time to render the frames.

  16. #16
    ٩๏̯͡๏)۶

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    Yay something in my field!

    Just rendering all depends what's in the current scene.

    Poly count - important. More poly = longer times. Not always a bad thing, but many things are avoidable by rendering onto flat planes instead.

    Lighting - Is the light source coming through the window? What is it going to hit? How much light will polygon 342 take as opposed to poly 211? etc.

    Reflection/Refraction/HDRI - Is the light going to bounce off anything? Like, will you have a ceramic cup in the scene reflecting everything that's going on? etc

    Texture detail - not as important, but big textures like to eat up the memory.


    Now creating the models themselves? All depends on the person. Organic/Humans take ages to make and perfect, most of what you see in FF animation is MoCap, but even with that, after it's sent back it's re-tweaked since it has to look as fluid as possible.

    Architectural work is cake(to me) but hard to others, and people/creatures are hard to me , but cake to others.

    Reason why it's hard to me is I have problems drawing things proportionately, if you cant draw then you cant really sculpt well since it'll look odd. So long as you can draw basically

    Im sure I posted this before, but here's something I did a while ago in college -

    http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v429/ ... TehPic.jpg
    http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v429/ ... ngRoom.jpg
    http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v429/ ... _Model.jpg
    http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v429/ ... in_Sun.jpg


    Renders didnt take that long, like 15-20mins for the Architecture, less than half that for the other two. I forgot, because it was so long ago.

    (the train is an animation, if you guys want i'll convert to divx and upload).

    SE's team use Maya for all their stuff, with their own custom tools, Nintendo also use Maya, other companies don't really mind 3dsmax, but if you're doing CG work rather than game work, expect to learn Maya.

  17. #17
    Groovebox
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    Animations that are output to film quality, probably take 1 hour per frame to render. Film is 24 fps, so 1 day of rendering = 1 second of the animation.

    Film quality is extremely huge compared to TV quality and whatnot. The WoW opening animation was probably just rendered at 800x600. Pre-rendered movies in video games are soon going to be a thing of the past though.

    Large companies such as Blizzard and SE probably use render farms, which are just a huge cluster of computers working together to render faster. I remember watching the toy story 2 DVD special features and hearing something like it taking 6 months for them to render the movie.

  18. #18
    Chram
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    Yeah wafik, I have the same preferences as you. I suck at organic modeling, but architectural stuff is very easy for me. It's probably because of my background, in highschool I took all mechanical and technical drawing classes, as well as CAD, architectural drawing.. rather than taking the standard art classes.

    I'm going back to college next year, can't wait.

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