DreamsPS4 Cutscene Creation and Puppeteering From GDC
Media Molecule attended GDC 2018 showing off great Dreams content. As we get closer to the Dreams release date, the more you get to see. Puppeteering was one of the big inspirations for the foundation of DreamsPS4. Ever since Dreams was a tech demo you’ve wondered how Mark and John were able to do their real time puppeteering during E3. Now you get to see how it works as well as getting a glimpse of characters from the story mode in Dreams 🙂 Let’s take you through the look of DreamsPS4 cutscene creation and puppeteering from GDC from todays Twitch footage.
Jon starts off with creating the scene with his expertise in rocks. Of course you can start with a bank canvas and go straight for making a character and animations, but scenery makes everything livid and rocking! Apart from the rock puns that started off in the Twitch chat, we’ve learned that up to this point as John explains, the artist prefer the PS moves and the designers lean more towards the DS4. This doesn’t mean they strictly use either or controller option but its part of the workflow preference seen at Mm. The scene came together quite nicely after some fully volumetric smoke was added to the cave.
With the scene completed, the animation is underway with Mike. Creating stop-motion butterflies, Mike makes an animation path for movement and shows how easy it is to duplicate and readjust other elements. The animation path is shown via light trails. Mike also mentioned that is personal preference right now for animation is with the Dualshock 4 controller due to the button designs. This isn’t too surprising because the DS4 is of course the more fluid and versatile for interaction. Any tool you use is mostly up to how you use it of course.
When setting up the camera tool. You can set parameters for things like following the imp, the scale of the imp, adding black bars to the camera for a more cinematic look, and all sorts of other options. The cutscene animation in Dreams starts to development as Mike uses voice acting with lancewing and recording animations with the action recorder. So animations get layered on top of each other. Within the Recording timeline you can see the different segments from the animation clip to the audio and even effects applied. You can redo any particular part in case you mess up or want to simply to a re-take.
Walk cycles since you’ve first seen them have had an improvement along with the new Dreams interface. These settings are all apart of the character tool. You can control movement in even more ways with options like jump height. There are pretty much options for controlling every part of a game character. Keyframes were shown in combination with the microchip showing how to transition from one frame to another; making an animation. The keyframe itself has options of course for things like animation frame blend type.
The last quarter of the stream showed a sneak peak at a few more Dreams story characters. You’ve seen the robotic skating elephant “EL-ED” from the story trailer and other Dreams livestreams. EL-ED uses the text gadget, for all of you wondering if you can input text in the game, as she’s catching some Z’s while sleeping. She’s definitely a new favorite character of everyone. EL-ED has the ability to suck up objects and spit them back out as she roller derbys around to her hearts content. Who wants to shoot some hoops?
The next character show on is the cinema guy. It’s a slow day at the theater since DreamsPS4 nor its beta is out just yet. A tough guy with a spiny tie! Hey at least it’s not raining in this scene as you’ve first saw during PSX with the character ART. Just look at the ambience of this scene as it captures the theatrical vibe you’d see in a town or city.
Next up you see a closer look at the older fella as he’s either swatting away the flies or smells something bad. Within his animation set, he also takes out a hearing amplifier. NPC’s can have inventory too!
You also get a sneak peak at the new DreamsPS4 Rainbow Six Siege DLC mission where Lancewing is in a hostage situation trapped in a cage and you and your squad of elite bad*** mother******* get to…..wait that’s not what happens..but don’t worry, no spoilers here. We’ll have to find out when DreamsPS4 releases what happens to Lancewing! Let us know what you think will happen in the story.
The next DreamsPS4 livestream will be coming up soon. Everyone says they want to see a more in-depth look at logic so we’ll probably see more of that shortly. For more DreamsPS4 updates follow ImpSpace on Twitter, YouTube, and join the Dreams Discord server for Dreams chatter. We’ll have more to share here at ImpSpace!
