Behind the scenes of Blizzard’s Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred trailer

For example, how a photographed chicken carcass inspired the team to create the interior of the Titan.

Here at before and after We regularly create visual effects and animations in films and episodes. But what about game trailers and movies? How do these kinds of storytelling come about, and what influences their design and execution?

Recently, Blizzard Entertainment released a trailer for their upcoming game Diablo IV The Vessel of Hatred expansion will be released on October 8. It gives us insight into Neyrelle’s fate in Mephisto’s clutches.

To find out how the trailer was created, before and after I spoke with Blizzard DFX manager Ashraf Ghonie, who is part of the studio’s Story and Franchise Development (SFD) team.

Join us as we discuss the story, art, and technology of the Diablo IV trailer, including the tools and approaches Blizzard uses and how a photographed chicken carcass provides an eerie reference for the gorier parts of the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtM0WpHEjWU

First steps with a trailer

The Story and Franchise Development group works closely with Blizzard’s games team on game trailers, and SFD is eager to help prepare for the release Diablo IV “Vessel of Hatred” expansion. When developing the elements of a trailer, Ghoniem admits that the process is similar to what might take place in an animation studio during the early stages of writing a script.

“We start with a few throws to the playing team,” Ghoniem says. “We work closely with them on the story they want to tell in their game and try to bring that to the cinematic version. We start working on the script right away. We go into beatboards, then we go into storyboards. We create full storyboards, previses, and then animation.

One of the first challenges for the SFD team at this stage is that if the team behind the game goes in a different direction story-wise when developing the game, this must also apply to their approach to any trailers. “If something really changes in their game during the planning process, we have to change too,” Ghoniem notes.

Character creation

Amazingly, all the characters featured in the trailer are hand-animated, meaning they were brought to life without the use of motion capture technology. When creating the characters, the SFD team used two full FACS (Facial Action Coding System) scans and relied on a range of off-the-shelf tools to deliver character work, including ZBrush, Maya, Mari, Katana and RenderMan, with aspects like clothing and hair handled Houdini.

“What we are pushing for in this article is to have a ground truth that we can always refer to,” advises Ghoniem. “For example, we shot an HDRI of the actual place where the character was standing, put footage of the real person there, and then put our CG model in the same place to make sure we got the look right.” *We shot the actresses and HDRI references in the same location to have a basis for comparing our assets using said HDRI. (trying to make it clearer?)

“We’re trying to make it more anatomically plausible, so the scanning was very useful,” Ghoniem adds.

Ghoniem continues: “The idea was that we didn’t want to have discussions based solely on feelings about the character’s appearance. We didn’t want to say, “I don’t think the ground is right.” I don’t think distraction does the right thing. The color is a bit off. We always placed our CG character right next to real photos in the same lighting conditions because we had parity available thanks to our master and HDRI.

A very noticeable aspect of the trailer is the attention to lighting on the characters’ faces. This element began with the art director building a color script that provided drawing still frames.

“When we started working on the lighting, we hoped that we would have a really solid idea of ​​where we wanted to go, even down to where the shadows would fall on the face,” describes Ghoniem. “We wanted to use the lighting to give the impression that she was alone at certain moments and to make her feel overly exposed and hot at other moments. It was all very thoughtful.”

Currency Challenges: Water and Sharing Hands

Much of the trailer takes place in a kayak on the water, which Blizzard obviously had to simulate. In this case, says Ghoniem, “we went as far as we could with FLIP in Houdini because we could really up the quality to make sure the simulators looked at the highest resolution possible. We used a PDG (procedural dependency graph) workflow to run shots in sequence.

Ghoniem felt that small details in the water, such as debris, helped sell the liquid simulators. “These little things look very complicated, but not much more budget-friendly. This made the whole thing look much more realistic. These are the things we were chasing, making sure we got the debris, the scum, and all the little things that move in the water as realistically as possible.

Meanwhile, Houdini’s simulations came into play in an even more elaborate way in moments in the trailer when Neyrelle is shown in Mephisto’s mind cave with her arms separated.

“It was interesting because we had a storyboard that everyone liked, it was very graphic, very interesting and there was a lot going on,” Ghoniem recalls. “At first we were going all out with blood. We had a very realistic representation of the stretching of blood and skin, but it turned out that it didn’t quite match up. It was strange. It was like, where does this thing come from? It was like trying to think too much about the anatomy of a breakup.

“So,” Ghoniem says, “we came up with the idea: ‘Let’s make it thicker by adding a lot of black.’ We made her body turn into Ichor, which is black goo. And when it separates, you’ll see the ichor react.

Inside the chicken

Indeed, the more terrifying moments in the trailer, where Neyrelle appears suspended in Titan, gave the SFD team the opportunity to “show off” the project a little more, especially in terms of gore, scale, and lighting. Finding a reference for these moments was particularly difficult, says Ghoniem, who says the art director eventually found a compelling source on which to base the look: the inside of a chicken.

“He discovered some great open chicken references. Someone took several photos of the chicken carcass in different lighting. You could see how the substrate reacted and how different parts of the chicken reacted to the light. It was beautiful. This became one of our most important reference points and it really helped because we were struggling for a while and it helped us get over the edge. It helped me make it all come true, at least a little bit.”

Directed by Doug Gregory
Artistic Director: Anthony Eftekhari
DFX Supervisor: Ashraf Ghoniem
Film producer: Alex Keller
Film editor: Adam Rickabus

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