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| BEHIND THE SCENES OF KQ2VGA - CREATING KOLYMA IN 3D |
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| Introduction |
It all started a year ago in January 2001 when AGD2 mentioned on the Tierra forums that they might be looking for someone to help them put together a 3D cutscene for KQ2VGA. I had joined the forums around the release of KQVGA and so, having some rudimentary knowledge of 3D graphics and an insatiable desire to be a part of the history-making AGD team, I emailed Tierra and asked if I could help out. Tierra reasonably requested some samples of my 3D work and I sent them what basic stuff I had, and they agreed to take me on.
A lot of the credit for this cutscene must actually go to AGD2. First of all, for his patience of the many delays and lapses in my working on this cutscene. Secondly, AGD2 worked with me every step of the way. He drafted the concept and developed it as he saw the work I was doing. Every day I would send him renderings, at the beginning stills and towards the end animations, and he would comment, make suggestions, provide great positive feedback, and tell me what I had to change  Thirdly, AGD2 provided me with a good number of textures and sprites that I couldn't make myself.
The process started with AGD2's outline for the scene, and he sent me a very rough FLC animation (with music!) of what the cutscene might be! In addition, AGD2 provided a lot of concept drawings and early screenshots from the game (continually sending me new versions when they affected what I was doing) for me to work off of. Using 3D Studio Max 4, I did some concept renders and tested some of the things I would have to learn. We divided the cutscene into two parts, part A (New Kolyma) and part B (Valanice's tower isle). I started working on part B right away. Looking back over much correspondance, the thing that's most interesting are AGD2's initial mandates: "the cutscene is only 15 seconds long" and "at the most, 30 seconds." Famous last words - the finished cutscene runs just over 1 minute, four times as long!
Of course, the initial expectation was that we would have to use the FLC format and a low framerate - once the MPEG format was incorporated into the AGS engine, we were really freed up in terms of what we could do.
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| Building Kolyma |
Turning quite a handful of screenshots into a working, 3D environment is actually harder than you would think. Consider that the screen resolution of the game is 320x200. That means whatever you see on the screen, from whichever perspective you look, you will see more width than length (assuming that these are all standard "one-room" screens, which they are). However, in the game not all of the screens are from the same perspective. In other words, to lay out the game screens neatly on a 3D map means that not all of your screens on the grid would be of equal size. So what AGD2 and I agreed was that some inaccuracies were unavoidable but that I would just do the best I could, since it would be impractical to work without a fixed-grid system.
To start with, I made a Max box primitive with an insane amount of length and width segments. Then I made a grid of posts to define the boundaries of each screen in the game, based on a map that AGD2 provided for me, and I decided to let each square of the grid run longer in width (east-west). Then I painted out the entire landscape in Photoshop and applied it to the box as a texture map. The next step was to shape the landscape. Using an 'Edit Mesh' modifier and the soft selection control, I created all the contours of the landscape.
Then came the fun - filling the landscape with all the goodness required for the scene. Because the camera is moving quite fast, some of the work that went into making the cutscene is hardly noticed. This is especially true of the Church. Thankfully, however, it also meant that some details could be omitted because they would not be seen. The lakes and pumpkins and all the background details (mountains, sea and sky) were added first, and then Grandma's house and the Church were added. Then the bridge and the other side of the chasm were added. Lastly, forest trees, fern plants, rocks along the shoreline, and palm trees were added, each one individually placed.
The trip through the tunnel was modelled and rendered separately and then composited into the scene. The door in the mountain was made early on, but at the last minute it was re-done for a few different reasons. The island with Valanice's tower was built in a similar way to part A (and was actually the first thing I made for the cutscene), and it was fun to create the other-worldy atmosphere with the orange sky and the luminous rocks and twisted trees on the island. All of the trees, ferns, etc. I modelled myself, except for the twisted plants in both part A and B and the twisted trunks of the palm trees in part B, which were exported as DXFs from the free program MECN Tree Factory.
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| Rendering |
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What took the longest in the process, at the end, was rendering the whole cutscene. The data file for part A took over 20 minutes just to load. Each frame was rendered separately in case of a system crash or if something had to be changed, then only the relevant frames had to be redone. While rendering a lot of test animations, the first thing we attempted to finalize was the animation of the camera path. It was a challenge to create such a long, continuous animation but it was a challenge we conquered early so that Tom could compose the music for the cutscene with the proper timing. We knew we were behind schedule so we wanted it to be easy to simply insert the finished cutscene at the last minute.
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| Conclusion |
In the end, working off and on, this cutscene took nearly a year to complete. It was a very unique experience to watch the development of the game from my limited perspective - seeing via screenshots almost all of Kolyma but not knowing anything about what was happening in it! I'm grateful to the AGDs for letting me be a part of KQ2VGA and I hope you like the cutscene and enjoy the game!
- Brandon Klassen (aka Relight), November 2002 -
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