Hey folks!

Those of you following this devlog may have heard that I was playing with the idea to move our cinematics into Unreal Engine. Now I did it and would like to discuss it with you!

If you played the playtest version of the game, you may be familiar with our pop-up book intro cinematic.

It was animated and rendered in 3dsMax. I'm still a big fan of Max and will continue making the animations and all 3D models with it, but I decided to move from pre-rendering videos in Max to render the cinematics in realtime in Unreal. Let me tell you why:

1. Rendering in-engine means people with high resolution screens can see the cinematics in high resolution, as it is not a rendered video file and e.g. limited to 1920x1080.

2. With only the first cinematic, the game was 600 MB in size, 150 MB of which were the one video file alone. Now, rendering in-engine, the game is only 500 MB, so the cinematic is only 50 MB of size and I expect the following ones only to even be less than 20 MB, because we will re-use the pop-up book models and animations.

3. We become more flexible in our workflow and don't have to wait for long renderings.

Before I tell you a bit about our workflow, here comes the first comparison:

As you can see, the difference is not crazy big. This is actually intended, because we quite liked the cinematics as they were visually. But when watching on fullscreen, you can see that the visual style of the new version fits the look of the game itself a lot more than the old version. One reason for this is that I am able to simply re-use the post-processing shaders that I wrote for the game itself when rendering the cinematics.

In this second comparison you can see that we use the new assets that were changed as the game evolved. Also, we took out the pop-up titles. I myself and others from our team were big fans of them, but they simply posed a problem regarding localization, which is why we removed them in favor of traditional subtitles for now.

In this last comparison you see that we e.g. switched out the raven that was crudely painted by me years ago with ravens how they actually look ingame, now that they are implemented. The reason here is mainly consistency. Also, we increased the level of detail a bit by adding a background to the scene.

I'd love to hear what you think. Maybe you don't like some of the visual changes or don't agree with the advantages I see in rendering in realtime? Let me know!

Alain