Including how a photographed chicken carcass gave the team inspiration for the look inside a titan.Here at befores & afters we regularly cover the making of visual effects and animation in films and episodic. But, what about game trailers and cinematics? How are those kinds of storytelling pieces created, and what goes into their design and execution?Recently, Blizzard Entertainment released a trailer for its upcoming Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred expansion launching on October 8. In it, we get a glimpse of the fate of Neyrelle while in the clutches of Mephisto.To find out how the trailer was made, befores & afters spoke with Blizzard DFX supervisor Ashraf Ghoniem, who is part of the studios Story and Franchise Development (SFD) team.Join us as we break down the story, art and tech of this Diablo IV trailer, including the tools and approaches utilized by Blizzard, and how a photographed chicken carcass offered some incredible reference for the trailers gorier parts.Getting started on the trailerThe Story and Franchise Development group works closely with the Blizzard game team on game trailers, with SFD looking to help set up the release of the Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred expansion. In working out what to feature in the trailer, Ghoniem shares that the process is similar to what might happen at an animation studio in terms of an initial script writing phase.Board to final.We start with a bunch of pitches to the game team, says Ghoniem. We work really tightly with them on what the story is theyre trying to tell in their game, and we try to bring that into the cinematic version. We start getting right into a script. We get into beat boards, then we go into storyboarding. We do full storyboards, previs, and then into animation.One early challenge for the SFD team at this stage is that if the game team moves in a different direction story-wise during game development, so too must the approach to any trailers. If something really changes in their game in the middle of our planning we also have to pivot, notes Ghoniem. Crafting a characterIncredibly, the characters featured in the trailer are all hand-animated, that is, they were brought to life without the use of motion capture. In building the characters, the SFD team used two full FACS (Facial Action Coding System) scans and relied on a number of off-the-shelf tools for delivering the character work, including ZBrush, Maya, Mari, Katana and RenderMan, with aspects like cloth and hair dealt with in Houdini.Something were pushing for on this piece is to have a ground truth that we can always reference to, advises Ghoniem. For example, we shot an HDRI of the actual location where the character was standing, and wed put the footage of the real person there and then our CG model in the same place to make sure that we nailed the look. *We shot references of the actresses and an HDRI in the same place as to have a ground truth to compare our assets against using said HDRI. (trying to make it more clear?)Were trying to make it more plausible anatomically, which is why the scanning was very useful, adds Ghoniem.Neyrelle model.Ghoniem continues: The whole point was that we didnt want to have discussions that are just feeling-based about how the characters look. We didnt want to say, I think the subsurface is not quite right. I think the diffuse is not doing the right things. The color feels a little off. We would always put our CG character right next to the real photography under the same lighting conditions since we had the parity available to us via our reference and HDRI.A very noticeable aspect of the trailer is the attention to lighting on the characters faces. This element began with the building of a color script by the art director, who would provide still frame draw-overs.The hope was when we started in lighting that wed have a really solid idea of where we wanted to go, even to the fact of where the shadows hit on the face, describes Ghoniem. We wanted to use lighting to bring that feeling in, of her being alone in certain moments, and then making her feel over exposed and hot for other moments. All that was very deliberate.FX challenges: water and splitting handsA large portion of the trailer takes place in a canoe on water, which Blizzard of course had to simulate. Here, says, Ghoniem, we went as far as we could with the FLIP solver in Houdini as we could to really push the quality to make sure that the sims were looking as high-res as possible. We used a PDG (procedural dependency graph) workflow to run shots out across sequences.Artwork for Neyrelle in flayed form.Ghoniem felt like the small details in the water, such as debris, helped sell the fluid sims. That small stuff adds up to look very complex, but not much more budget. It actually made the piece look a lot more realistic. Those are the things we chased, making sure we got the debris and the scum and all the little stuff that moves in the water as realistically as possible.Meanwhile, Houdini simulations came into play in an even more complicated way for moments in the trailer when Neyrelle is shown in Mephistos mind-lair, and her arms being split.Artwork for Vhenards eerie transformation.That was an interesting one because we had a storyboard that everybody loved that was very super graphic and very interesting and had a lot going on in it, recalls Ghoniem. Originally, we were going over the top with the gore on it. We had a very realistic rendering of the blood and skin stretching, but we found that it didnt quite plate. It felt weird. It was like, where does that thing come from? It was as if, youre trying to think too much about the anatomy of the split.So, says Ghoniem, we had this idea, Lets just make it thicker with a lot of black in there. We made it like her body was being turned into Ichor, which is the black goo. Then when it splits, youd see the ichor react.Inside a chickenIndeed, those scarier moments in the trailer in which Neyrelle appears strung up inside a Titan provided the SFD team with an opportunity to be a little more out there with the design, especially in terms of gore, scale and lighting. Finding reference for these moments was particularly challenging, relates Ghoniem, who says that the art director ultimately found a compelling resource to base the look off of: the inside of a chicken.Mephisto chamber artwork.What he found was some great references of a chicken opened up. Somebody had taken a bunch of pictures of a chicken carcass with different lights. You could see how the subsurface reacted and how different parts of the chicken reacted to light. It was beautiful. That became one of our big references and really helped, because we were struggling for a little while and that helped us get over the edge. It helped bring everything into reality, at least a little bit.Director: Doug GregoryArt director: Anthony EftekhariDFX supervisor: Ashraf GhoniemCinematic Producer: Alex KellerCinematic Editor: Adam RickabusThe post Behind the scenes of Blizzards Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred trailer appeared first on befores & afters.