#warneverchanges

Warhammer is for everyone.

Fallout 4: TV Effects

For the opening scene in Fallout 4 we had Ron Perlman return and the voice of the newscaster reading the news while the bombs dropped. The task to create the newscast and make it look like it was on the TV fell to me. Unfortunately we were not going to support video as textures in the engine so I had to find a clever way to work around that limitation.

I had previously written a Max script to build stepped UV keys so I could put my flip book textures from particles onto geometry. Using this I could basically get video from After Effects to an animated texture in the game. To prove this could work as our solution I created a test space to record my video, baked out and quickly animated an actor, stubbed in the prop meshes and background map, and then put the resulting animation into a texture on the screen. I added a looping layer of screen warp and high res animating noise to create the look of the old television broadcast.

My first test included still frames as commercial to break up the broadcast because I had no idea yet how much time we had to fill if the player was not progressing the scene.

As the test footage of the news anchor sat in the game it became clear the looping animation was not in alignment with the dialog. I had hoped this would be small enough to get away with because of the crude implementation and lack of control it afforded. In the end it was not because this was something we were directing the player to pay close attention to.

With the help of Rick Vicens and the animation team we created a plan to fill the time with a series on mo-capped animations all ending in the idle pose shown in the picture at the top. The final lines would be one long unique animation mo-capped to match. It occurs to me this may be the only time in gaming history mo-cap was recorded for a texture:)

Along the way I had the idea to add in an old commercial from the Fallout 3 advertising instead of the still frames. Due to limitations in texture space I had to resort to cutting up loops from the commercial and then filling it the timing to match the audio.

Once we had the updated animation I rebuilt my fake actor asset as a real actor with better clothes and a baked out facegen face courtesy of tech artist Felipe Noguiera. Now we could play the animations and have his mouth move without hand animating it. We set up the mocap data and an idle and captured it as video in the engine.

The last step was to use the looping idles to match the Ron Perlman dialog as closely as possible. To do this we used the old brute force approach. I was currently crunching to finish VFX for the game so animator Barry Nardone stepped in to help. He loaded the lines into max and stitched together combinations of the looping idles to match each one.

Here are the final assets in game:

And people found my recording studio as well:)