Xenosaga II at Tokyo Nation CG Film Festival "TIGRAF" (2003)

https://web.archive.org/web/20130630113549/http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/20031107/tigraf.htm

Translation by: Gwendal

GAME WATCH 2

Tokyo Nation CG Film Festival "TIGRAF"
The third day showcased games
Jam-packed with the living voices of the creators

From November 4-7

Venue: Roppongi Academy Hills Tower Hall




The CG festival "TIGRAF" has been part of the Toyko National Festival of Moving Images since last year. The third day, November 6, was dedicated to a "gaming showcase" featuring presentations by well-known creators. This special symposium was made up of four presentations from Monolith Soft Ltd., Square-Enix Ltd., and Mr. Tetsuya Mizuguchi, now a freelancer after the recent closing of United Game Artists Ltd. The last presentation was by Mr./Mrs. Misato [?] Watanabe, representing GTV Ltd. as a modeller.

"The world of Monolith Soft", offering us a glimpse at the creation of "Xenosaga Episode II" and "Baten Kaitos"

Monolith Soft's representative Mr. Hirohide Sugiura took to the stage, alongside Monolith employees Norihiro Takami and Taizou Inukai. While showing images from the company's games under development, "Xenosaga I Episode II (EPII)" and "Baten Kaitos", they also talked about rising costs for graphics, and how their company is trying to achieve a better cost-performance ratio in addition to focusing on higher quality, by developing more effectively.

They started off showing promotional movies for the two titles. While these were based on what was shown at the 2003 Tokyo Game Show, they certainly had a strong impact when shown on such a big screen.

According to "EPII" Art Director Mr. Takami, "Since the majority of event scenes in 'EPII' are rendered on the actual hardware, we've constructed a real-time demo scene." His reasoning for this was that the game [=character?] models could be improved even at the PS2 class [?], while still attaining an acceptable level of quality for the event demo". Or so they seem to have decided. The benefit of doing it this way is that it becomes to possible to lower costs by using the regular models for event scenes, but on the other hand, they might stand out [as looking bad] no matter how much the quality of the movies might be improved.

Top image 1: Monolith Soft's Mr. Sugiura
Top image 2: Mr. Takami (left) and Mr. Inukai (right)

Moving on, he introduced the process used to create the motion capture for "EPII"'s event movies. At Monolith Soft, they record the model's coordinate data, while also recording the capture image with a DV camera at the same time. First, they cut the scenario up into storyboards, and the dialogue is recorded in advance. They also adjust the composition of the image at this point, including camera angles. When they get to motion capture, the coordinates are recorded at the studio while the dialogue is playing, and the actor does his or her performance towards the DV camera. Naturally, the amount of material that needs to be recorded for a scene varies with the performance and changes to the scenario, but by planning thoroughly, wasted efforts can be kept to a minimum in order to reduce costs.

They then go through the event scenes, combined from storyboards+dialogue, DV camera images, and capture data in order, finally turning them into a coherent whole. It was easy to understand how they worked to complete the cutscene, matching the character movements and camera angles in advance.

But that doesn't mean the process to create the [final] images ends there. Without all those ever-present effects such as rain flowing across the screen, special effects from attacks and rapid camera movements, there would be no sense of your surroundings, and the demo scene would feel empty and sterile.

This is where the baton was passed to Mr. Inukai, in charge of effects. On the subject of effects, they're about more than just explosions or flashy lights during battles, but also something that affects the visual effectiveness [of the game] in general. Mr. Inukai showed images from "Baten Kaitos" and "EPII" while explaining about what kinds of locations you can actually apply effects to. In actual fact, effects aren't just part of the graphic designer's job; they also require close collaboration with programmers. It seems like there's also some difficulties with doing them in real-time, but [Mr. Inukai] showed us proof of what can be accomplished when you have this kind of collaboration.

Bottom image 1: Storyboard. As the scenario develops, dialogue is recorded as well
Bottom image 2: An actor performing in sync with the dialogue towards the DV camera
Bottom image 3: The three different processes shown at the same time on one screen
Bottom image 4: We were introduced to several examples, making the role of effects in "EPII" easy to understand

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