We have all marvelled at superb looking computer generated segments in a game or even movie where you know it is not real but its sheer detail is almost awe inspiring. Based in Hungary, Digic Pictures is one such studio creating visual effects and high quality animations for games and films. Their current project is the creation of an enticing teaser and supplemental visuals for the NAMCO title Warhammer Mark of Chaos.

Derek dela Fuente spoke with Gabor Marinov, Producer at Digic Pictures, to find out more about what goes on at this studio.

How many people work at Digic Pictures; what is your setup and expertise?

Digic is a computer animation studio located in Budapest, Hungary. Our company is part of the Cinergi Interactive group, owned by Hungarian born Hollywood producer Andy Vajna. Currently the company has 18 employees.

Our goal is to create high quality computer animated movies, continuing the great tradition of Hungarian animation in the digital age. We have worked on feature film visual effects as well.

The team is comprised of experienced Hungarian CG professionals, who came from the world of advertisement and visual effects. Unlike smaller studios, we also employ many traditional artists and engineers who haven't had any previous experience with 3D graphics. This is possible because of our unique production pipeline that has been in development for four years. Every team member has a highly specialized role in the pipeline, optimized for character animation.

Both our animation director, Istvan Zorkoczy, and our CG Supervisor, Robert Kovacs, are seasoned CG veterans. Our art director, Peter Fendrik, who joined us in 2005, has previously been working at an advertising agency and pursued 3D graphics as a hobby.

What games have you created CG for, what other areas do you cover outside of the gaming industry and how did you team up with Black Hole, who are creating the Warhammer Mark of Chaos game?

Digic Pictures grew out of the game development company, Black Hole, in late 2001. Its sole purpose was to create rendered cinematics for Black Hole's PC game; Armies of Exigo. In those days our name was simply "movie team", and had only three members. Later, the "movie team" was expanded to include experienced fellow artists who were trained in commercial visual effects.

After completing the Exigo Intro, Digic submitted the film into the 2003 SIGGRAPH Animation Festival, where it was selected into the "Electronic Theater". This project was the first Hungarian animation that has ever received this prestigious recognition.

The Electronic Theatre features a yearly compilation of computer animation selected by a professional jury. It was fantastic to see our project listed next to such works as "The Matrix Reloaded" VFX and "The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers" VFX.

This is how we met Andy Vajna, the key investor of Black Hole. He gave us the name: Digic Pictures, and encouraged the team to expand its talent into feature films as well. This is how we got into creating visual effects for "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines".

Digic Pictures has developed visual effects for 60 shots for T3 in 2003. We joined the project in the last three months of the production, so the visual effects we worked on ranged from simple compositing to complex effects. Although some of our members had previous experience with movie visual effects, this project was another "first", as no Hungarian animation studio had ever worked on Hollywood movie effects before.

Around this time Digic separated from Black Hole, and became an independent company. During 2004 the team created an additional four rendered cinematics for Armies of Exigo, totaling almost 10 minutes.

There were a few other interesting projects, but unfortunately I'm not allowed to talk about them.

Can you tell us a little about your role with Warhammer Mark of Chaos; how you interact with the studio creating the game, what kind of research you do and how involved you need to be in the game to get the right look and feel of what you are creating?

Digic has already created a 40 second teaser for "Warhammer: Mark of Chaos", and we are working on a 3.5 minute long intro for the game. Obviously, we know the game developer studio Black Hole quite well.

During the development of the Warhammer cinematics, the team dug itself deep into the fantastic Warhammer Universe. We were constantly discussing the project with Games Workshop, Namco and Black Hole. The purpose of the intro is to establish the Warhammer world and to set the tone for the game's environment through the actions of its surprisingly detailed characters. We would like to present the world of Warhammer as if someone with a movie camera was there. We would like our players to almost feel the struggling of the troops on whom everything is worn, used and dirty from constant fighting; this is not a fairy tale...

Games Workshop makes sure that we're faithful to the Warhammer universe. Since they created this world, they make sure that everything we create is authentic. At the same time, they are open to new ideas and generally are a very pleasant group to work with.

We're continuously told about the convergence between videogames and movies; what are your thoughts on this subject, do you see both the industries as being complementary and can you see a tighter fusion between the two in the future?

The economic presence of the game industry is rapidly growing in the entertainment industry. We have already seen many complimentary game adaptations of different movies, but I think the tides might easily turn the other way around. I can easily imagine a time when the interactive version of a story will have the same or even greater importance than the movie based on it. The recent trend of movies that are based on video games points into this direction.

" It is still very exciting to see how game developers with a talent for movies like Hideo Kojima create better and better real time cinematics on the newest consoles."

A story being told by a game is fundamentally different from a movie. In games the audience is interactive. The player makes choices and is responsible for his or her actions. Story telling through films is set along a specific path which was established by the director. This is why games can compliment movies very successfully.

As far as technology goes, the two industries are indeed getting closer. More and more elements are introduced to real-time 3D animations in recent games that were only seen in high-end animated movies and visual effects before. This will apparently remove the difference between "pre-rendered" and "realtime rendered" in the end, as we will be able to display even the most complex visuals in real time.

Of course this sounds a bit futuristic, and I don't know how long it will take, but perhaps it isn't as far as we would think.

Visionary companies, such as NVidia, are already spending a considerable amount of money on developing "Gelato". It is a renderer that uses the graphics hardware to generate photorealistic images, even though it's still far from real time.

Another good example is Pixar's "LPICS" lighting system that was developed for internal use, and was introduced to the public at the 2005 Siggraph conference. This system is used to light scenes in their upcoming movie, "Cars". This software allows their artists to work on a nearly final quality image, almost in real time, speeding up the production considerably.

What type of hardware is used at Digic?

As far as hardware goes, we have single and dual processor 3.2 GHz P4 Intel workstations, 7 high capacity file servers with total storage capacity in the terabytes range and a renderfarm containing 56 3.2 GHz P4 Xeon processors. The renderfarm is crunching the numbers for 24 hours a day during most of the production. Gigabit Ethernet network connects the machines; its central element is a huge Cisco backbone switch.

What kind of tools and hardware do you use and have created? Do you have a big R/D department and do you view the next batch of console machines as exciting and advantageous to Digic Pictures?

The movie production pipeline at Digic is comprised of high-end software. Its foundation is Alias Maya, which we have extended with many custom developed plugins and scripts. We use Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman, and Mental Images Mental Ray together for rendering. Compositing is done with Eyeon Digital Fusion, D2 Nuke and Adobe After Effects. There are additional great tools that we also use such as Pixologic's Zbrush for sculpting character details or SyFlex for dynamic physics simulations

Digic places very strong emphasis on programming our own tools, including our project-and-asset management software. This high degree of customization gives our traditional artists creative freedom without having to worry too much about technical issues.

Custom tools are a necessity for us because the amount of data needed for our models and their textures is immense. It is impossible to load all the elements of a scene into the 3D application. We really had to devise a system to manage this. For example, the human hero of the Warhammer intro has almost a hundred textures, with a resolution of 4096x4096 pixels. This takes up 2.5 gigabytes of compressed data (more than 6 gigabytes uncompressed). There are scenes in the intro that have more than 50 of these characters animated simultaneously.

Digic is committed to carefully crafted details. Even though the newest consoles, Xbox360 and Playstation3, are a lot more powerful than their predecessors, we still could not reach a satisfactory level of detail. Therefore, we do not plan to create real time animations at the present time.

It is still very exciting to see how game developers with a talent for movies like Hideo Kojima create better and better real time cinematics on the newest consoles.

What is the Hungarian animation and gaming scene like?

Hungary is a very small country - about 10 million people - and so are the animation, visual effects and game industries in it.

However, Hungary has a great tradition of animated movies. One of the most prominent animation studios of the '80s in the world, Pannónia Filmstúdió, was located here.

Nowadays, visual effects created in CG studios are mostly used for commercials and occasionally for feature films. There are several post production houses that were built on this formula in Hungary. Digic is in a somewhat unique position, because it does not create CG for commercials. Digic specializes in continuing the traditionally great values of animated films into the digital 3D age.

I think that the reason for seemingly few studios coming out of Hungary is the relatively small size of the country.

Can you tell us about some of the influencing factors behind Digic Pictures and your goals for the next few years?

Our goal is to create even longer animated movies, without sacrificing the visual quality of our previous work. Achieving this goal is a serious challenge, but we continuously keep it in mind as we develop our production pipeline. The Hungarian government also provides the movie industry with some special tax allowances, and this includes animated movies as well.

What are the current fav games in Hungary?

It might sound strange, but there is no game play in the offices of Digic Pictures. We had some regular Quake Multiplayer parties some years ago, but these weren't really helping the work. Therefore, we separated the two and now the studio is the place to create exclusively, the gaming is done at home.

What material and research did you do for Warhammer and were there specific areas of the game you had to create renders/animation for and have there been any problems or hurdles you've had to overcome?

We thoroughly examined the workings of the Warhammer world, its creatures and their characteristics, so that we would be able to recreate them faithfully in our movies. A good example is that nobody is perfectly "good" in this world; everyone is deceitful a bit. So we gave a little bit of viciousness to the Warrior Priest, the main character of the intro, and you can see that he's not exactly a snow-white lamb either...

For this project, we created the largest cast, with the highest level of detail that we ever worked with before. Our biggest challenge was handling the enormous amount of data created throughout the production, taking up several terabytes altogether. I have to say that our custom developed project manager software and other production tools took the load quite well. Without them it would have been impossible to complete the Warhammer movies.

Do you hope to work on future gaming projects?

Yes, I would love to see more fantastic creatures brought to life by Digic, and I also hope that one day I will see movies from Digic on the big screen.

TVG would like to thank Gabor Marinov for sharing some time to talk with us, we'll have more from Digic Pictures in the future. Warhammer Mark of Chaos is currently in development and slated for release on the PC in the autumn; we'll have further coverage soon...