Cut scenes in games – Super hard

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been working on making the cut scene – the first one, which would introduce the first part of the story to the player. What I’ve learned is that it’s much harder than I thought.

My assumptions before starting

I thought that since I have experience with animations and key framing, I would have ease going through the cutscene animations. After all, I have rigged characters ready to animate, all I need is a reference footage and I can start animating! Spoiler alert -> I was wrong. So very wrong.

Characters

Even if you have rigged characters, you might not have what you need. There are countless amounts of different rigs that different engines use to animate a character. E.g. Some characters might have 25 bones on their face just to control their expressions, others might just have 1 head bone because they don’t require facial expressions. They might be okay with just the head movement

3d Software

It took me 2 weeks just to get comfortable with Blender – an open source 3d software that many indies like myself use for animations, modelling and sculpting etc. The community is amazing and supportive, I had tonnes of people volunteering to help out. A special shout out to fudgenuggets87 whose great advice on reddit encouraged me to start learning blender.

Reference Footage

Note to self -> It’s impossible to record your own video from an orthographic view rather than a perspective view. It’s impossible to align your own reference footage with the animation because there will be no amount of angles that you can use to compensate for the fact that your camera has only 1 lens. And if you don’t use a reference footage, you risk animating your characters a little too cartoonish. Here’s what I mean:

So where am I now?

Finally, now I am fluent enough with Blender to produce an acceptable animation. But still, it takes me 3 hours to do about 15-20 seconds right. Having said that, All in your head game will not have more than 3 3 or 4 minutes of animated cutscenes. So I think we’re good for as far as the timeline is concerned.

Here’s a sneak peak of the new features of the level. What do you think?

As always, feel free to comment your feedback, email me or follow me on twitter. Thanks for reading, I’ll see you in the next one.