[QUOTE="Bansheesdie"] [QUOTE="el_rika"]Hope they have Motion Captured animations this time, especially in the cutscenes, 'cose halo 2's cutscenes had some horrible animations.el_rika
Halo 3's cutscenes will be perfect.
How do you know that ?
Here's is what Bungie.net's content guy had to say about Halo 3's cinematics... (Long Read)
... CJ Cowan, our cinematics director, sends me the following enigmatic message: "If you have a moment, come and see the new coolness." I kicked myself down the stairs, Sparta-style, and rolled up to his desk to see some recent cinematics passes. I'd sort of forgotten about them, since they've been crunching hard and quietly, and literally in a far corner of the studio. The progress is impressive, to say the least.
With Halo 3, as with halo 2 and 1, we're using the actual engine for cinematics. It's a conscious decision based on a simple philosophy - don't yank the player out of the game, and dazzle them with graphics that are alien to their gameplay experience. Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite cinematics ever do exactly that, and in my opinion, successfully - Final Fantasy, DOA, Tekken even, all use high quality CG renders to display their cinematics. And the results are fantastic. They propel narrative and they're a reward for completing gameplay tasks.
In Halo 3 though, we made a deliberate and difficult choice. Believe it or not, it would in some ways have been easier to just storyboard this and hand it off to someone like Digital Domain to render into CG. Instead, we took the harder and seemingly counterintuitive route so that our Cinematics will blend, as seamlessly as possible with our gameplay.
Now for confession time: In Halo 2, we simply didn't have the time or resources to make the cinematics the way we wanted them to be. They were compromised by deadlines and resources and while the results were heroic and herculean achievements of hard work and talent, they simply weren't as polished or pretty as we wanted them to be. This time, no hurdles got in our way. Cinematics has had all the lovin' it needs.
For starters, there's a bigger team, a team that has had the final cinematic script for much longer, and now has access to vastly more tools, resources and technology than ever before. These range from new tools for rigging facial animation, to better lighting and camera controls. Most of the improvements are a solid blend of technology and manpower this time around, and we hope the fruits of that labor end up as succulent as they look now.
Seeing Sergeant Johnson's face in the Halo 3 cinematics (there are differences in detail and post-processing effects) is a revelation. Using tools on site, our cinematics guys are able to achieve not only proper lip-syncing, but easily rig facial expressions too. In Halo 2, some of that was actually handled by programmers, including Sgt. Johnson's, and I quote, "Amorous" permutation in the tank delivery scene in Halo 2. Now, there's a running gag in game development called, "Programmer Art" where a programmer puts in some placeholder art until an artist can get to it. Bur programmer emotion? Surely that's pushing some sort of envelope?
Well this time the emotions and lighting are being handled by a team of 35 animators and cinematics guys only. And they're not scrubs. We have folks who've worked on movies like Shrek, King Kong, Gollum from LOTR and more. So, no compromises. It will still look like game engine (with the aforementioned enhancements, like depth of field and higher levels of detail) but it's just going to be better.
Dialog is all recorded and implemented, but seeing the properly modeled and animated characters speaking it is a breath of fresh air. Recent builds have had low-res, unlit heads with broken necks speaking the lines, or worse, the line being automatically recited by a robot speech synthesizer. It's actually pretty sophisticated until it tries to parse the word, "Mmmmhmm."
Perhaps more enticingly, I watched storyboard and cinematics cheery, chirpy, cockney -blam!-parrow, Lee Wilson lighting a familiar character who never, ever looked so good. Too good in fact. "Yeah, guv'nor," says Lee in his jarring Pygmalionesque pidgin, "She ort to 'ave 'er shaders fixed, or she don't arf look nude. I don't mind the raspberry ripples meself, but Mrs. Wilson would 'ave a roight fit."
And right behind him, Dorje, one of our amazingly talented artists, was putting the finishing touches to the skybox to end all skyboxes. Let's just say it might have something to do with the amazing space battle Kurt Nellis (a genius who we swiped from ILM) is working on. Everything is starting to look polished and pretty.
That probably goes for the story too, but we would say that. I think the way our cinematics close this chapter of the trilogy will be one of the more memorable aspects of Halo 3, and put the bookends on a Campaign game that's becoming something special.
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