cutscenes

Many video games have cutscenes that could never have been generated by the game engine. I wonder how these sometimes near-realistic looking cutscenes or intro scenes are made? I know you could make them to some extent with programs such as 3dsmax but I am wondering, are there any specialized programs that do this?

 

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what do you have in mind? And what's wrong with 3DMAX?
They re-render the images...with more N-Polygons making an image.

try POV-Ray.

 

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Indeed there are several ways of making more realistic cut-scenes. They can use the same engine and simply tell it to do more (since it will be saving each image to a HDD rather than rendering it in real-time) thus they can do more lighting, shadowing, furthur filtering and AA passes, render half a billion more polygons, etc..
Moddelling programs can also be used, such as 3DS Max, and of course theres always specialized commercial programs, as well as custom-made tools. However, they have to use somebodys engine to render them, might as well jack-up their own, it's no that their engine couldnt do that realistic, it's that that engine couldn't do that realistic efficiantly eanough for the current hardware to render it fast eanough for gameplay.

-Andrew

 

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One such Commercial package for Rendering, specifically Render Farms (Entire networks devote to just rendering scenes) would be Renderman. If you didn't know Pixar is responsible for Renderman.