Month: September 2022

Toy Story made animation history by being the first computer-animated feature film. Animation previously was hand-drawn. Pixar paved the way by implementing toys and human characters into a detailed world with attention to light rigging and texture. Disney and Pixar collaborated on this film with Pixar receiving $26 million. The company at the time was also chaired by Steve Jobs. Software engineer Ed Catmull and other computer scientists built a new software called RenderMan to design the characters. RenderMan combines all the 3D assets of a frame and converts it into a realistic image. Because of the software’s limitations to perfectly geometric objects, the plastic look gave way to toy characters. Toy Story received a Special Achievement Academy Award for the attention it brought to CGI. Pixar has continued to refine its technology to make animation movement incredibly realistic as seen in the recent film, Soul.

An interactive computational project I love is Genshin Impact, an open-world RPG game created with Unity Engine. I’ve never played a game before that is as immersive as this one. Not only does the player feel submerged in its universe because of its compelling storytelling, but the graphics, visual details, and small homages scattered all over the world give it life. Although some may disagree, I’d say Hoyoverse, its developing company, was inspired by Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild that features similar gameplay. One unique aspect about it is that it is an online game (although not necessarily MMORPG). This prevents players from accessing certain program files that may contain story leaks and still-developing content. I also cannot wrap my head around the fact that this massive (200GB), beautiful world is able to exist in the “cloud.” I’m not tech-savvy so I don’t know if this is better than not having online servers, but it has always impressed me nonetheless. To me, it gives the impression that future video games don’t have to be restricted by hardware and may one day exist entirely through software (I’m not a game developer… I don’t know if this sounds accurate at all).

Official Website: https://genshin.hoyoverse.com/en/home

A computational project that had inspired me before my time at CMU is the game Elden Ring, developed by FromSoftware. When I first got my hands on it, I had already seen the trailer, so I expected to be greeted with incredible graphics and exciting gameplay. However, seeing a game in a trailer and playing it yourself are entirely different experiences, so much so that I was already enthralled by what I was greeted with in the tutorial. Though this initial gameplay only involved my character needed to learn the basics of controlling movement and combat, the exquisite quality of every single frame combined with the already progressing story hooked me. In a trance and completely immersed, I thought I was already playing the game before I realized that it was only the tutorial and that I needed to emerge out of the cave and go into the first leveling area of the game called Limgrave. The game knows that it is beautiful. The way that Limgrave is revealed to the player is classic: the cave’s gate is opened out into a lush, hilly environment scattered with shimmering, golden trees and tall grass, amongst them roaming animals such as fluffy, tumbling sheep and brown eagles. Dominating the landscape was an enormous golden tree that resembled Yggdrasil, whose reason for existence seemed to mimic the sun in our world; endless rays of lights were beaming off of its crown, with its leaves of shimmering yellow raining onto the face of the world. In the background, I could spot hints of the medieval-looking architectural ruins of an ancient church. After I admired the environment by walking around or gazing into the distance, I knew that the church was where I needed to go. Thus my 100-hour journey to defeat the game had started. The game was directed Hidetaka Miyazaki with worldbuilding provided by the fantasy writer George R. R. Martin. To me, this is a superteam, as Hidetaka Miyazaki was heavily inspired by the artistic style of the Berserk manga, which is one of the greatest manga ever written, and George R. R. Martin is the great mind behind the Game of Thrones books. To my knowledge, Elden Ring was made in Unreal Engine, with its terrain being sculpted inside the program. The project’s creators, since they were working with FromSoftware, needed to take heed to the past works from the video game development company, notably, the Dark Souls franchise. The artistic style of both Dark Souls and Elden Ring clearly are of the same vein, and the style of gameplay in both games involve leveling your character by beating bosses. The project points toward more games of the same fashion. The gaming community speculates a sequel game to Elden Ring coming in a few years.

I found taking away the stroke to be the most challenging. (I still could not figure it out).