Hello World,
Well the trailer for the game is finally finished! After lots of difficulties and probably unnecessary steps we are all finally happy with it!
I started with the trailer by animating 2 cut-scenes in Maya using the characters and colosseum I modeled. After about 15 hours I was happy with the key-framed animation I had made. The next step was the tricky part. I needed to set up cameras within Maya and rig them to move with the animations and then export the cut-scenes from those camera’s views. After another 2 hours or so, I had 7 cameras set up between the 2 cut-scenes and I was ready to start rendering the scenes.
At first, I attempted to export the entire cut-scene as a .AVI file, however for some reason I was able to view the cut-scene in Windows Media Player, but it wouldn’t show any frames in my movie editor, Magix Movie Edit Pro MX, or in any other movie editor on my machine except Windows Live Movie Editor. Even within the 1 program it did work in, only some of the frames showed up. I had to go back to Maya and export every single frame (from every camera) as a .JPG. Once I rendered both cut-scenes (About 500 frames all together), I had to import all the images into Magix and string together each frame. I then rendered each cut-scene camera angle. After that, I edited together the angles to make an effective cut-scene. I found out from my group that we wouldn’t be able to include the cut-scenes in the game, as we are unsure how to play a video using our game engine.
Trailer Storyboard Page 1
Trailer Storyboard Page 2
I decided instead of just scrapping the cut-scenes I spent so long on all together, that they would just enhance the Game Trailer. Before I could start putting together the game trailer though, I had to capture some in-game footage. Using my past experience in cinematography, I knew the most logical place to start was by drawing storyboards. After that, I went through the game and screen captured all the in-game footage I need using Fraps. I then took all the files into Magix and edited them together in the order that I drew out in my story boards. Once I was happy with how the trailer footage looked, I exported the trailer without any sound to show people in my group and make sure everyone was happy with it. I then took the rendered video file back into Magix and went through the sound files we have throughout our game and found some sounds that went well with the footage. After about an hour I finished placing the audio files on the video and rendered the final pass of our game’s trailer.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you like the trailer.
– TBibes: Signing Off.
Scorching South Studios 