We’re really happy to share with our reader this interview with Platige Image Director TOMEK BAGIŃSKI and Platige CG Supervisor GRZEGORZ KUKUŚ about the making of Witcher 3 Wild Hunt Epic Cinematic.
IT’S ART : Can you speak about your collaboration with CD Projekt Red since the first trailers released for the Witcher Saga?
TOMEK BAGIŃSKI : We’ve known each other for many years and we’ve outgrown the simple client-vendor relationship a long time ago. It’s a lot deeper, more creative, and a lot more demanding. We’re more like partners than contractors. We admire each other’s work and have a lot of trust in each other. And you’re not all that likely to find words like these in a description of an average business relationship. This establishes a situation that is simultaneously satisfying and demanding. During nearly all of our projects we’re forced to implement last minute changes in very late stages of production, which is not all that appealing in animation. Why do we do it, then? Simply put, for the resultant quality. We know that it is the final product that will be remembered by people and sometimes improving the product is worth sacrificing for.
[dailymotion]https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x13nlp2_the-witcher-3-gamescom-trailer_videogames[/dailymotion]
IT’S ART : Looks like you’ve tried to achieve a more realistic look than in other cinematics? Am I wrong? Why this choice ?
TOMEK BAGIŃSKI : The cinematic was based on a small-scale premise. A handful of characters, a single location, and one intense narrative. No explosions, no car chases, falling buildings. There is nothing that would easily help us make this film look cool. We had to do it the hard way, then. We knew that achieving a high level of realism is still mostly impossible with CGI and we knew that it would be surely impossible for us. However, we were interested in pushing the envelope as far as we can. And we believed in the power of our story. We knew that we had something powerful and simple and to win this we had to make every single detail count.
IT’S ART : Trying to be so realistic request a lot of work on textures and modeling. Can you speak about these parts?
GRZEGORZ KUKUŚ : It was an arduous task, not only during asset creation but during the entire production process. We started out by doing an extensive reference shoot. The majority of characters were based on real actors, so aside from the scans we shot a few hundred high-resolution pictures for each of the actors, thus acquiring a vast reference repository for even the most minute detail. Hair was done using a similar approach. We started by sketching out our female character’s hairstyle and later styled the actor’s hair to match the sketches. Only then did we start to recreate it in 3D. In the case of hair, it’s very difficult to introduce changes, especially when it comes to complex hairstyles. Each major change basically forces us to start anew. Having an unequivocal reference allowed us to shorten the entire process to just over a dozen days.
Making of fight scene by Senior Character Animator Sebastian Kalemba
[dailymotion]https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x14b6x5_witcher-3-wild-hunt-making-fight-scene_videogames[/dailymotion]
GRZEGORZ KUKUŚ : Mari, a piece of software we’ve been using for the past few years really helped us with textures. Its biggest advantage is the ability to work with really high resolutions on multiple layers simultaneously. Moreover, the workflow between Mari and 3D software is so well developed that the amount and size of the textures is no longer a limitation. The software also works much faster, even despite the huge number of details, than just a few years ago. In some of the shots we had over a thousand 4k-8k textures, and we basically haven’t experienced any latencies during rendering, but that’s thanks to Arnold.
[dailymotion]https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x14bdhe_making-of-witch-hunter-3-it-s-art-mix_videogames[/dailymotion]
