Diablo III Creating the Black Soulstone video/Making of “Black Soulstone”

The following text with the pictures is the translation of this article, which, in turn, is a colorful illustrated abstract of the clock presentation on BlizzCon, dedicated to the process of creating this amazing video of the future game.

. To watch Black Soulstone click here..

Often, the cinematic side of the games is deprived of the attention of most gamers. In many cases, especially today, much more efforts are invested in these short, hyper-detailed rollers than in any scene of a similar duration in most full-length films. An impeccably executed small clip often suffers due to its duration. Being too short, it can easily be lost from attention or completely missed without the slightest fluctuations.

In this article, I would like to help you understand how many skills and mutual cooperation is required to create a really fantastic video. To create such a believable and detailed world through a computer, a crazy amount of time and accuracy is required. Thousands of man-hours can be needed to create a three-minute video such as “The Black Soulstone”. I will try to introduce you as best as possible to the process, which was discussed at the presentation. In addition, so that this article does not turn into a simple book with pictures, I am going to accompany the images with an explanatory text. So feel free to press the images for more detailed familiarization.

Before the presentation began, we found out that the clip “The Black Soulstone” (which is incomplete in order to avoid spoilers) is only 3 out of 27 minutes of cinematic cards, which will be present in Diablo III. I don’t know how the guys are for you, but only these 27 minutes of the KAT scenes are enough for me to take popcorn and enjoy their viewing.

The narrative

The most important part of the cinematic video is how well he tells the story. This process begins with a gear – the collective effort of the whole team to make the minimum detailed sketches of the scenes that they want to tie together and include in the video sequence. The director and his team are sitting and forming a rental, cooperating with “related” teams that will help in working on the video. This process does not stop throughout the production from beginning to end. Whether it is work on a visual nearby, music, or characters;Everything should be planned on the rental.

The presented example is Leah’s reaction to the appearance of an azmodan. How she expresses this fear, was supposed to be planned on the rental. This large selection can have a huge impact on the development of the personality of lei. If she starts screaming and nervous, it will say something completely different about her than in the case when she is simply afraid and retreats back. The angles of the camera and focusing points also help to better convey the character’s emotions. And again I will repeat, it is from this that it all begins.

Color script

Color plays a very large role in how the scene is perceived. This is confirmed by the fact that there is a whole team working only on color. The Diablo series with all its earthy shades is especially sensitive to directing and working with color. In fact, the transmission of color is so important that from early rendering to final processing is a very controversial and discussed moment.

The evolution of the characters

The development of characters in Diablo III rotates around three main concepts: the meaning for the game, the right place in history, an affordable technology. Azmodan went through many iterations, starting from the hybrid of the angel and demon, then, passing the stage of the warrior’s appearance, and, finally, to the type of “crab/wrestler Sumo”, which you can see today. The final appearance was chosen among others, since it embodies all seven mortal sins that Azmodan personifies – the Lord of Sin. For example, the shape of his body speaks of gluttony and greed, while the details on the surface of the body mean pride and vanity.

After the character’s concept is invented, it must be realized. Thanks to the enormous efforts of many teams and people, the character is modeled in 3D, is textured and painted, adjusted to smooth animation, animated and, who knows how long, is finalized, before he complies with all the standards and expectations of the director. It is given to such a type that all of the above is even a damage to the volume of work.

Nevertheless, with such a level of professionalism, not everything takes away a lot of time as you may seem. For example, most of the demonic horde that you see in the video was designed and pre -modeled in just two days. However, as they say, the whole “life” in details. And bringing the details of these creatures to perfection – exactly what takes the most time. After initial modeling, work on the object is transmitted to the following team, which specializes in creating textures. Using the initial two-dimensional concept art, this team is working on the transfer of two-dimensional textures to three-dimensional space, and carefully “wrapps” the creature into it. Their goal is the perfect compliance with a two -dimensional concept, since it was precisely such a final type of creature that was approved by the director.

Particle effects

In addition to the models of the characters themselves, there are tons of the surrounding effects and particles that add as much “character” to the character as traditional techniques make it: leather, voice, behavior, etc.D. Example: the steaming effect of the eye of King Lich enhances his supernatural aura. Another example: the smoke coming from all demons in the video “The Black Soulstone”. These effects should be invisible, because if they attract too much attention to themselves, then this will distract the viewer from more important things that occur on the screen.

References to real life

When your goal is to do something believable, what can be better than studying similar things in the real world? This is exactly what the teams do throughout the work on the video. All this is done thanks to the search for textures, light effects, texttraur/tones of the skin and other things from real life, with their subsequent photography. Then, after the necessary pictures are obtained, the team recreates them in the computer. This is a fairly long and painful process in which the smear is recreated using various programs.

. The results can be truly amazing...

As in the case of working on improving https://kinghillscasino.uk/ textures and lighting effects, to create a believably drawn person, you first need to study it. In order to move in the right direction when creating Leia, the teams studied how things look in real life and in similar circumstances that they wanted to recreate in the video. In general terms, they created a photographic situation, as the one that can be seen at the beginning of the video. Including stones, girl (their producer), candles, and similar lighting. Then, they told the photographer what to do to achieve maximum similarity to what the director wants to see in the final version of the video.

Continuing their study, they took enlarged photographs of various facial expressions, as well as eye expressions for a better understanding of how to neatly recreate the face, which, quite reasonably, is a difficult task, if we are talking about realistic art. As Blizzard expected, the guys advanced much further than just working with photos. They installed a special camera to capture the effect of “overlapping” of light, color saturation, and the location of textures on various faces that they can use while creating a character model. From the moment of early rendering to almost completed work, hundreds and hundreds of settings and change are required, including lighting, textures, shaders, and many other factors. Even using real samples.

Facial animation

As in the case of lighting and textures, the animated team begins its training with photographing similar objects of the real world. First, they took hundreds of photographs of various facial expressions to understand how different facial muscles move during each expression. Their goal was to copy every muscle on the face and transfer to the model of their character so that they could accurately recreate different emotions through the character. They have reached this goal and the results speak for themselves.

They did the same for the expressions of the eyes. With a closer examination, it can be noted that the human eye and eyelids have micro-twisting, which are completely invisible in a normal situation. Closely looking at the old models of characters in videos, something always seems wrong. You can not always say what exactly, but something in your brain says-this is not the present. And this quite negatively affects the transfer of emotions to this character. Everything lies in these inconspicuous movements, thanks to which the character comes to life, and suddenly, all his emotions become much more realistic. This can be seen while Lea gets into her sleep at the beginning of the video.

This tendency to study also found its application when observing the hand during writing. Small things, for example, a pen pressing on paper while you write. Or as certain tiny musukuls are reduced with small movements. Through the close interaction of animation, design, and modeling commands, they eventually managed to achieve their goal – to create a believable character interacting with the same believable world.

Dynamic systems

Features of the character, which are constantly and strongly changing, are known as dynamic systems. Take, for example, hair or clothes. When successful in their study in real life, similar simulating techniques were used, which were involved in improving the animation of the hair. The guys from the team found an employee with their hair like a lei, found a fan, and began to work, forcing the employee to duplicate the movements of the lei, which she had to perform in the video, thus adding the effect of the wind.

After all the necessary information was received and all observations were made, the team moved to modeling and animation. Hair has an obvious problem – they are hundreds of thousands of tiny threads, the individual movements of which are almost impossible to simulate. Therefore, instead of working with each individual thread, the guys started with fairly large strands, in which there were about five thousand hair. Then they divided these strands into smaller, say, 200. These strands with a smaller number of hair are already moving individually. In addition to these strands, they added various hair models and effects to make all this look realistic – like a real moving hundred thousand hair.

Another thing for which the team of dynamic systems is responsible – Riga. In essence, Riga is the basic models of the character, divided into individual parts, which, in turn, are connected at the reference points so that the animated team can force the character to move. Imagine that Riga is moving figures. The process of their creation is a rather subtle work, a slot with the wrong riggin of the model, it will not be possible to create realistic movements of the character.

It is interesting that movements should not always make sense until you look at the entire model. The scene presented in the lower left corner shows how the Azmodan hangs over the heroine, which looks quite natural from this corner. Now, if you move the camera and look at the entire Rig of the demon, you will see that he is actually “broken”. And this makes us understand that his movements are completely impossible, if we talk about realism.

To make all these movements plausible, first the team must study similar creatures in the real world. However, the fact that there are no creatures similar to the Azmodan on Earth, sad. Instead, the team watched the crabs and movements of their lower body, and the sumo fighters to better understand the mechanics of the upper body. Thanks to magnificent creativity, they managed to unite these two parts and create a very believable rig.

Azmodan says

The next test for the team was to force Azmodan to be plausible to speak with the complete absence of lips. In order to pronounce sounds such as “pi” and “be” you should have a way to block the flow of air out of the mouth. It just so happened that Azmodan has no lips, so instead of them, they used very accentuated movements of his jaw and tongue to create actions corresponding to pronunciation. The final result was just perfect, and adds a frightening factor during the approach of the camera.

Hordes of evil

During the last part of the video, tons of marching creatures are visible, each of which, it would seem, has individual behavior. In order to flood the entire screen with perfectly animated creatures, the team needed to use “smoke and mirrors”. Creatures in the background have a very simple animation in which these small detailed movements are not used, which we can notice on more important large plans. An even more important point is unique animations called “heroes animations”. As the link shows, this is a classification of animation, which is not attached to living creatures. Another trick that was used to create the illusion of the uniqueness of each individual creature is an individual tuning of how creatures hold weapons. Changing this parameter, the authors created a magnificent silhouette visible through the entire army, where there are no two copies inclined at the same angle.

The necessary things

Unfortunately, not everything reaches the final stage. In fact, most original concepts will never see the light. One of the actively shocked details was the bench saliva of Azmodan. Tried various types of viscosity until they found the one that succeeds. Added lighting and textures, and then even added it to the final model. And with all this work, the final result did not live up to expectations. It seemed to the team that the stazo seemed to be a slobbery, even comical – two features that were in no way part of the character of the Azmodan;Therefore, they completely removed her. Some effects that have “survived” to the final version of the azmodan include such wonderful things as light effects from the mouth and eyes combined with a thermal distorting filter.

Lighting effects

Lighting effects in the video can do all the work, and can ruin it. During the presentation, Blizzard mentioned how they adopted the same advanced technology of special effects used by large film companies. These effects are used for high -quality lighting anywhere, but, especially when working with persons. No one looks good in poor lighting – it lowers every small part to a completely unacceptable level. Combining clear details of strong light and the greased effects of soft lighting, the team managed to achieve beautiful frames that look clearly and, at the same time, delicately.

Characters interact with many different lighting sources that affect them at the same time. The shown example is Lea, who is under five different light sources, when she first faces a face to face with Azmodan in her dream. Combining all these sources, the team can return and configure each of them separately, until they are satisfied with the result. Another type of work with light is in interaction with visualization elements. By and large, these are just different layers of one frame. Each of them has its own effects, which are superimposed on the same frame, but do not affect each other.

Destroying the walls

Moving to the scene where the azmodan destroys the stone wall, his plans open up to escape from the sanctuary. How it was done is very impressive. In addition to working with light effects that were supposed to change as a result of the destruction of the wall, then how the team managed to destroy the wall with kinematogaphically, it is quite interesting. A formative technique called Voronoi was used. Briefly, they placed accidentally located points on a flat surface, drew the lines at the same distance from these points, after which these lines were used to create organic forms that looked very natural.

It is also worthy of mention that falling stones did not pass through any type of physical simulators. The director had a very specific image in his head, so each individual stone consisting of more than 40.000 fragments that you have seen were individually animated during the fall and interaction among themselves.

Well, perhaps that’s all. I hope you liked our small journey describing the creation of the Black Soulstone Cinematic video, and you learned a little about the absurd amount of efforts that are required to create these small windows in the world of the sanctuary.

. For complete familiarization, make sure you watched the presentation!..
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The article worked:

Dopecrawler – Translation of the article, transmission of the video
Mirak – Everything else
We also thank the user Machiavel For help with the translation of the cinematic video.

The best comments

We hope that those who like the cinema -chain videos of Blizzard, as well as from wonderful games, this article will be interesting.

Well, I didn’t cut off my time right. Writing a draft took two days (not entirely, of course, but only part of the late evening and night). In total, probably three hours. Most of the time has gone to gently place links and not get confused in many open tabs with pictures. For this, three albums with full -sized illustrations were created in the gallery, reduced by their copies and pictures, opening by click on the word highlighted in the text. Well, after writing each paragraph, it was necessary to check what and how it happened, is there where there are jambs. Through the ass? Certainly. But what is the result)

It took about an hour to subtitles, but this is not because of the complexity of the work (everything is very simple here), but because of the programs that fell several times, plus, some fuss with the YouTube account.

How much time it took to translation of the article I definitely do not know, it is better to ask Dopecrawler.

What, however, perfectionism in the close -ups in everything. I wonder how much time the creation took All videos, if with this they fiddled for more than a year?

And the article is wonderful, thanks for such a big job. By the way, there is nothing near the link, the original was either completely removed, or transferred. And the trailer would still reload somewhere on another hosting (funny, even after the game releases this video, plot and complete on YouTube is also blocked).

While I just looked at the video, then I read the article then somehow at my leisure. Saba are good.
I see so, the pictures here are a whole bunch, there are still opening the links and there are a lot of text. This post was made for a long time?

Not a machine translation, with breaks for the use of coffee and to view some nonsense on the Internet, took about 5 hours.