Shuttle Craft Hangar Cinematic Sequence

Planning Phase
We started this assignment with a multitude of ideas, varying in styles, themes, pacing and action. We knew that the camera work wasn’t going to be any problem as our first assignment prepared us well for the task at hand but as we discovered, there was a severe lack of suitable cinematic animations to use for our sequences which stifled some of our first designs.
After exploring all the different character meshes and animation sequences we knew our limitations and proceeded to research into professional game trailers. Observing the techniques employed in game trailers allowed us to better plan our sequences, sketching the storyboards, preparing Visio plans and finalise the design phase.

Construction of Sets
With the basic layout planned our aim was to construct the level in a similar fashion to a movie set, having multiple versions of the same location made the creation of sequences a breeze but before any of the detailing went into the level we created the basic geometry wherein our matinee sequences would take place, allowing for simultaneous work on both the level creation and animation pieces.

The downfall to having multiple iterations of the same areas were that in order to clone the location, every single brush and static mesh had to be selected, which is an irritating process as the editor tends to break down if you require a restoration point.

Compiling the Matinee Sequences
Following the storyboards that depicted the events we needed to create made most of the scenes very easy and quick to produce. There were a few issues regarding the sentry guns and the finale but the rest was a fairly comfortable experience due to previous experience with camera pathing and AI scripting.

Issues Encountered
The first issue we encountered was our sentry gun scene; the level editor game rules are set for standard death-match, which prohibits the use of vehicles and sentry guns. In order to overcome this problem required the use of a script we found whilst researching how to solve the issue, unfortunately the presence of the sentry guns in the level was only the beginning of the problem.

We were unable to command the sentry guns to fire via script and they wouldn’t fire upon AI controller assigned pawns. Not wanting to waste too much time on a sequence that would only last fifteen seconds at most, we replaced the AI controller pawns with bots. The bots were held up in small rooms until a trigger condition was met which would open the doors allowing the bots to follow the path nodes and for the sentry guns to open fire, fulfilling the scene requirements.
Another issue encountered was the inability to trigger music by means of an AI script; the option is there however when testing the feature the music failed to play. Being unable to trigger music once the level has been fully loaded presented us with a de-synchronisation issue between picture and sound, largely depending how quickly the machine loads the game. We tried to combat the issue by placing a ten second delay on both the game and music, which seemed to work the majority of the time.

What would we do differently?
I believe the most disappointing element of our work is the sound effects, tried as we did to solve the issues it would have been a far better outcome had the sounds been trigged in-game and setup in a manner that suits the sequences. Given as most sound effects in game trailers are a combination of in-game and video/sound editing I think that our piece of work turned out well but there is certainly room for improvement.