Dragon’s Dogma Developer Blog

The folks at CAPCOM have been offering yet another entry of their official blog focused on Dragon’s Dogma. This time, cinematics artist Kimihiro Tomio discusses the technology that allows them to display characters with customized heights and such during cutscenes:

Some of the characteristics of cinematics include displaying complex behaviors that can’t be done in game such as characters embracing or holding certain objects and the ability to clearly convey emotion or intent. But the biggest characteristic of cinematics is camera framing. Although it may seem completely obvious, there’s no such thing as a cinematic that doesn’t use camera framing. When considering framing the most important thing to think about is how the subject will show up in the final piece. However when your subject’s height and frame can be changed from the ability to customize them you can’t really lock down your framing. So, for instance, if you locked down the framing for a shot taken from the bust up of the hero and heroine facing each other, increasing the height of the hero by 30cm would lead to his head being cut out of frame.

So I’m sure you can deduce from the preceding explanation that customizable character sizes and cinematics do not go well together at all. I racked my brain over this problem more than any other at the beginning of development. After much trial and error, I finally arrived at my solution implementing a function that would automatically compensate the camera and motion based on the size of the character and would immediately reflect that result into a real-time rendered cinematic.

This automatic compensation function is incredibly smart, so to return to the previous example wherein the hero and heroine were facing each other, even if the hero or heroine’s height were to be varied, the system will automatically adjust the framing so that both of the characters’ faces are shown in frame. Furthermore, using motion compensation, even if the characters bend their necks at a different angle then they’ll still be looking at each other’s faces. And even if the hero places his hand on the heroine’s shoulder this function will compensate for the size of the character to ensure the hand stops at the proper coordinate. Using this we were able to solve many of the problems associated with the in-game cinematics. However this wasn’t an end-all-be-all cure to all of our problems. For instance the difference in strides a character takes from their variations in height. The key to solving the rest of the problems we faced was manipulation of something that is all-important to us designers the camera angle. In other words, we were careful to show only what we wanted people to see, while not showing what we didn’t.

The result was being able to achieve incredibly natural camera framing of performances by customized characters utilizing our automatic compensation function and camera angles unique to Dragon’s Dogma. When you play the game for the first time you will probably watch the real-time rendered cinematics without even noticing. But after beating the game please go through for a second run. At that point you’ll notice that, even with a completely different sized character, you will be able to enjoy cinematics that will flow naturally but with different camera framing. And if you are able to enjoy the performances of the cinematics on both play-throughs without feeling any unnatural changes then we can confidently say that our experiment with this was a success.