“Character Creation Pipeline and Rendering in Destiny” by Tatarchuk, Burke, Sanocki and Jones
Conference:
Type(s):
Entry Number: 15
Title:
- Character Creation Pipeline and Rendering in Destiny
Course Organizer(s):
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
Prerequisites
Basic understanding of 3D modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation.
Intended Audience
Technical artists, 3D modelers, character riggers, and animation engineers.
Description
In Bungie’s upcoming video game Destiny, character creators needed to produce a variety of visually advanced content that would be rendered in real time for in-game scenarios and in-engine cinematics. This course explores the challenges and constraints presented by console hardware and the real-life production needs of Bungie’s pipelines for player and cinematic hair authoring and animation, and face-animation retargeting.
The course summarizes the techniques the character creators used to set up a future-proof geometry pipeline for hair rendering, developing hair shading that is integrated seamlessly into the full lighting pipeline for deferred rendering, and creating believable motion across a variety of console hardware. Topics include: how Bungie achieved high-quality face animation in in-engine real-time cinematics using face-animation retargeting; how tens of player-customizable heads shared a single animation across different human, alien, and robot races and genders; parameterization for the facial data for future-proofing the rigs; the tools and rig controls built for the animators; and evolution of the face-animation retargeting system.