Painted Worlds: The Lost Art of Pre Rendered Backgrounds

[Music] when i was a wee lad 3d was the hot new thing if you made an ad a music video or a tv show with 3d graphics it was almost guaranteed to be a hit to my soft young bungee mind 2d animation had become outdated and babyish a relic of ancient history 3d graphics seemed like the peak of technological advancement nothing will ever look this good video games were going through their own technological puberty around this time by transitioning into 3d there were some growing pains a lot of games didn't translate well to 3d or had to be stripped back from the scope of their ambition there were some success stories but for the most part it was an awkward learning phase for developers who weren't familiar with the technology or mechanics of 3d spaces on top of this real-time 3d environments were expensive to make and difficult to run on the hardware of the time for some developers the answer to this was to set their games in worlds that were smaller in scale and less detailed but there was another option [Music] so what is a pre-rendered background as the name implies this is a 3d image that has been compiled and rendered beforehand and isn't generated by the graphics engine in real time these would usually take the form of jpeg images although sometimes these are bookended by short animations in many cases they are made using separate equipment to the rest of the assets in the game for example the backgrounds and fmvs in the playstation 1 final fantasy games were made using the silicon graphics supercomputer onyx developers would draw paths and collision data on top of these images so that the player character can move around the space with perspective changes and foreground objects conveying the illusion of a truly 3d environment sometimes a first-person perspective is used which eliminates the need to have any real-time sprites for the player to control developers would also add in interactive 3d objects and short animations to give the scene added life things like water fire small animals are the souls of the eternally damned and hated lively stuff all of these details maintain the illusion that the player is in a real space the ability to render backgrounds beforehand means the artists can add a lot more detail to the environment than was possible with real-time graphics this method is not without its shortcomings though interactivity is limited and this somewhat dampens the sense that we are experiencing a truly 3d world one drawback that developers turned to their advantage was the fixed camera angle of a pre-rendered background because it is essentially a 2d image the player can't move the camera freely like they can in a fully 3d world on paper this might sound limiting or unintuitive but in practice this means that developers and artists working on the game can deliberately place elements within a scene to convey a certain feeling or invoke an atmosphere towards the player [Music] let's take final fantasy vii as an example one of the central teams of the game is the overwhelming power of capitalism and its destructive effect on the environment the evil shinra corporation is draining the planet's resources using mako reactors and it's up to our heroes to stop them and maybe breed a chocobo or two along the way among other things this is beautifully conveyed using backgrounds throughout the game in this scene we see the player dwarfed by the gargantuan size of the mako reactor as they make their way through the environment the scope and level of detail on show here would not have been possible using the real-time rendered graphics on the playstation 1. the oppressive tableau of the shinra power plants are contrasted throughout with more serene imagery such as the ramshackle yet communal slum of sector 8 or the remnants of the village in gongaga with every new environment final fantasy vii managed to reinforce its story's teams and subtly conveyed varying emotions to the player ranging from hope to despair and something in between the deliberate framing of pre-rendered backgrounds gave square a way to visually communicate their story that was both lovingly crafted and deeply immersive similar to this is the sleek and moody backgrounds of blade runner the adventure game adaptation of the classic film which immerses the player in its cyberpunk noir setting the composition of this scene references the edward hopper painting nighthawks itself a noir visual touchstone this type of deliberate illusion would not be possible with a fully interactive 3d camera fixed camera angles and pre-rendered backgrounds allow developers to frame each shot much like a cinematographer would do for a movie and game makers often utilize methods that have been developed in film alone in the dark is one of the proto survival horror games and it draws on a rich history of horror cinema for its visual language it presents chilling scenes that give the player limited information about what's lurking around the corner mechanically heightening tension and contributing to the game's already unsettling atmosphere the game also makes liberal use of a framing technique known as the dutch tilt or angle said angling of the camera is a technique that was developed in the silent german expressionist films of the 1920s and is typically employed to convey tension or mental strain it became a mainstay of horror cinema and sequentially in games such as resident evil the original resident evil and its 2002 remake were both particularly adept at utilizing the camera to incite fear in the player after the infamous dog corridor early on in the spencer mansion the player can find refuge behind a door once they walk through the camera hugs into a medium shot of the player character momentarily blinding the player to any trash that may be in the room this audacious camera angle is one of the most obvious attempts to raise tension by withholding visual information from the player but you can find many examples like this throughout the game as with many artistic techniques pre-rendered backgrounds began to show their limitations as the years went on as technology advanced developers found that they could feasibly make more realistic 3d environments worlds that were interactive and immersive in ways that static backgrounds could never really be there was also the obvious contrast between the pre-rendered backgrounds and interactive elements anything the player can move had an unfortunate tendency to stick out on screen like a sore tom this drawback is not unlike something that often occurred in older hand-drawn animation where the matte painted backgrounds looked strangely detached from the animated cells that were drawn over them in games this visual disparity was relatively inconsequential on the chunky old crt tvs as the image quality wasn't always sharp enough to give away the interactive elements this was a sticking point in some of the reviews for the final fantasy 8 remaster where the player character models were stylishly updated but the backgrounds were ostensibly not as the years went on and games started to reach their college party phase pre-rendered backgrounds began to die out franchises and genres that were synonymous with the form adopted a more updated look the change in visual development can easily be linked to a number of mechanical changes that occurred thereafter final fantasy moved away from turn-based battles into real-time hack-em-ups resident evil 4 popularized a third-person over-the-shoulder view setting the standard for every third-person shooter for the next decade and while there are a lot of great games that hugely benefited from this style it's worth remembering what they left behind a bespoke visual language dictated by the creators that may have limited the player's view but did so in order to present an undiluted sense of atmosphere the pre-rendered method hasn't gone away completely some games still use this style with contemporary game engines allowing for even more immersive animated elements and dynamic lighting other video game creators have used hand-drawn environments in much the same way with games like rayman legends and hollow knight applying modern animation techniques to feed more depth into the backgrounds fantasian the new game from final fantasy creator hironobu sakaguchi uses backgrounds that are hand crafted from materials like wood plastic and clay and these backgrounds are imported into the game for the player to move around these sometimes literally handcrafted environments show that this visual art continues to evolve to this day with ai upscaling technology and a renewed emphasis on game preservation hopefully this style of game will live on for generations to come [Music] you

Channel: The Cardboard Box Item

Views: 17,093

Keywords: fixed camera angles, pre rendered backgrounds, PS1 games, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX, Grim Fandango, Survival Horror, Resident Evil Remake, Blade Runner, Alone in The Dark, retro games

Id: qqkRvMPq06A

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021