Tau End Cinematic Commentary
I figured the Tau movie was going to be a challenge, because I had never used them before, and I was just as confused at how to fight them. All I knew was their motto, “For the Greater Good”. Eventually, after working on the game for several months, I was able to get a better grasp on them. Even though I didn’t full understand the race, I put in some very creative ideas into this cinematic. As a result, it was a favorite of many coworkers at Iron Lore. It was the fourth video I did.
Part 1
Scene 1
The scene starts out with an odd, purple-ish storm in the sky. My thought was, if you were standing on Kaurava III, looking at Kaurava IV, what would the Warpstorm look like? This skybox seemed to fit the best. The rest of the scene shows the Tau taking on the Necron. I had to update this scene several times to get it to match the actual map which was updated at random times beyond my knowing.
My first attempt at battle failed miserably. I randomly placed Tau and Necron units across the crater and gave the Tau warriors invincibility so they would inevitably win. It was intended to be a free-for-all. Tau players at work explained to me that this is not how the Tau fights. It’s more of a tactical, ranged combat in heavily planted squads. So I redid the scene to meet their expectations. I put in some Tau Barracudas, the new flying unit for the Tau, to promote our newest addition. I came back to rerecord the scene one last time at the end and new art for the Barracudas blast effect had been added, turning this into the biggest plasma explosion scene ever.
Scene 2This scene simply continues to show the Tau battling other races on other planets to give depth to how large this war was. Here, they are destroying a Dark Eldar (one of the two races added in Soulstorm) base. I hadn’t used the Dark Eldar much in the other videos and thought this would be a good place to add them.
Scene 3More battles. I just needed to fill the time. I used one of the assimilated races, the Kroot, against the Orks, both of which are very beastly. The main reason I had this shot was to have a close-up on the Gnarloc thrashing Orks around in its mouth. :)
Part 2
Scene 1
This part forced me to learn how to show buildings being constructed. I figured I could just run the buildings animation of construction, but it never worked. Instead, I had to look through all the docs to realize I had to set the progress of the building’s construction (like 40% complete) to get the proper animation. After learning that, I could make scenes where buildings were all in different states of their construction.
As an artistic point, notice the decals running along the ground and how they line up with the buildings and the power generators. I was pretending like the buildings were being powered under these grey areas from the power generator. Not sure if anyone else noticed that.
Scene 2To be honest, I was really surprised this scene worked at all. I recorded the same scripted sequence twice: once with the warpstorm sky and red-tinted lighting and again with a bright white sky and blue-tinted lighting. Interlacing these together in the video editor wasn’t the problem. I had several flying units move from one location to another, not on a path. This should produce somewhat random results, I figured. However, when I lined them up in the video editor, the planes did the same movement exactly in both recordings.
The reason I didn’t put the flyers on a path, which is used to precisely say where a unit goes and how they move, is because the functionality was broken! The whole concept of flyers is new to our expansion and whenever I attempted to put them on a path, they sunk to the ground and moved along the path without actually flying. Obviously this didn’t work. The programmers had too much on their plates to fix it, so I had to make do with what I had. I did eventually get functionality to set the flyers at different heights. This would work some days and then be horribly broken the next. I can only assume it was the programmers trying many different things to get the in-game functionality to work. I complained a lot, probably driving them crazy, to get the height setting function working, as it was crucial to my cinematics.
Part 3
Scene 1
Since the Tau started at the moon orbiting Kaurava II, I figured natural expansion would lead them to the planet Kaurava II. So, I took the Space Marine’s base and transformed it into a Tau city. I had a small set of Tau art and nothing to visualize what a Tau city would look like. Thus, the city was a concept of my own. This was the most enjoyable set that I got to arrange. I basically got to be a kid again playing in a free sandbox. The end result turned out to be quite a magnificent city. Unfortunately, I had to cut most of the scene as it was way longer than the dialogue went. Thankfully, I get to show another view of the city in the next scene.
Framerate was a major concern of this video. The camera moved fast over a large city, turning several times. Whenever the camera turned, it really got choppy. Later on, I realized fast turns work better if you slightly rotate the yaw of the camera. The rest was dependent on changing how far the fog of war was and how high-quality the graphics were.
By the way, the city buildings you see in this set are comprised of the few Tau art set that I had available, not necessarily were they intended to be pieced together for buildings.
Scene 2In this scene, I exploit the engine like it’s never been done before in any other Dawn of War game. When the camera moves beyond the shell of an object, the object disappears (or clips). I got the idea of showing the inside of one of these weird Tau buildings. Never before had there been an inside scene (nor was I instructed to do so). The idea was to show the newly appointed Ethereal watching over his city, bowing thankfully to it (being that it was only there because the Tau had won the war). I put an object below and above where the Ethereal was going to be, creating the ceiling and the floor. There was a narrow path the camera could take to not clip through these two objects. The object that the camera is inside is almost completely invisible, so it looked like a big gaping hole.
I needed to form some kind of inside structure to give the feel that we were actually inside this building. I wanted dark pillars to form supports and create fake windows. The only art that I could find was the bottom of telephone poles. If the camera were any higher, you’d see telephone wire. :) Lastly, which should have been firstly, I had to raise the ground high enough for the Ethereal to stand on (he can’t stand on objects, he just sinks through them). Sadly, raising the ground raises all the objects above it, so I had to realign everything again. This all took several hours to get it to look right, but I’m glad I spent the time getting it right, because it is a very innovative scene.