Final Fantasy XIII's Cut Scenes Detailed at SIGGRAPH Asia

The Asian version of computer graphics expo SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, is being held this week at Pacifico Yokohama. Square Enix had its graphics masters in attendance on the 16th for a revealing lecture titled "FFXIII Real time Cut Scene Work Flow."

Impress Watch posted a summary of the speech, which was given by Event Motion Director Yusuke Tanaka and other members of the game's visual staff.

Just a few stats. Final Fantasy XIII has nine hours of cut scenes. This is split between pre-rendered movies, created by Square Enix's internal movie production team "Visual Works," and six hours of real time rendered scenes. The latter area was the topic of the lecture, and according to Tanaka, it took 16 months to produce the full lot.

The Impress article goes on to describe the work process for creating the real time cut scenes, including converting story boards to video, motion capture recording, facial animation work, development tools, lip synching, hair and cloth animation, physics, and special effects.

I'm not going to have time to summarize it all, so you'll have to Google it. Or, just look at the pictures, which include lots of FFXIII development shots. Towards the bottom of the article, you can see some familiar FFXIII scenes without post processing effects. There are also grabs of some of the Crystal Tools development apps.

Lightning with and without lighting adjustments.

Vanille without post effect filters and with a color correction filter.

This is one of the tools in the Crystal Tools.

Visit Impress Watch for a bunch more