Cinematic Pipelines for AAA Dramatics

Modern AAA story-driven games use iterative performance capture to deliver beautifully realistic cut scenes and storytelling, layering more and more detail into the animation data during the production life cycle to create movement, lipsync and facial expression that is indistinguishable from real life.

When shooting for performance capture the point cloud data of the camera work can be recorded and transposed into the engine, allowing for dynamic ‘live on set’ camera production techniques to be edited and replayed within the engine identically to traditional film making.

For more details there is an excellent (albeit quite old) article by Digital Worlds on modern performance capture techniques here.

The orphaned performance capture data makes it’s journey through the animation pipeline to become a blocked character scene, and becomes reunited with the edited multi camera data and narrative audio track once placed inside the engine.

The scene is integrated into the level for scripting and sequencing by the level designer in order to fit within the context of the story, and with any associated gameplay mechanics applied to make it operate as an interactive event, rather than a conventional cutscene within a film or animation context.