Ubisoft Uses Softimage Tools to Create “Rainbow Six 3” Cinematics

Xbox

SOFTIMAGE|BEHAVIOR and SOFTIMAGE|XSI bring thousands of CG characters to life in Tom Clancy-inspired video game

Montreal, Quebec – January 7, 2004 – Softimage Co., a subsidiary of Avid Technology, Inc., today announced that Ubisoft™, one of the world's largest and most successful video game producers and publishers, used the SOFTIMAGE®|BEHAVIOR™ crowd simulation software and the SOFTIMAGE|XSI® nonlinear 3-D production environment to create the cinematics sequences in “Rainbow Six® 3” for Xbox – an award-winning tactical strategy game based on a license from the Tom Clancy best-selling novel Rainbow Six. Both Softimage systems were used to create and animate the cinematic sequences, including massive crowd scenes for the game, which feature thousands of CG characters interacting in a lifelike way. To-date, the “Rainbow Six” series of games has sold more than 7.5 million copies worldwide.

Set in the year 2007, with the world on the brink of a global conflict, “Rainbow Six 3” features stunning graphics and cinematics that deliver a movie-quality experience. One of the main sequences, directed by Marco Brambilla of “Demolition Man” fame, portrays a gigantic crowd cheering beneath a dictator delivering a speech from a balcony. The crowd consists of more than one thousand CG men, women, and children, whose movements and mannerisms were assembled using the SOFTIMAGE|BEHAVIOR system.

“We wanted to create a powerful crowd scene for the game,” explains Gaetan Richard, Ubisoft’s Cinematic Studio Producer. “With extremely tight deadlines and limited resources, we knew that it wouldn’t be possible to create thousands of random and realistic character behaviors by hand. That’s when we turned to SOFTIMAGE|BEHAVIOR, which allowed us to design and animate multiple types of characters and styles of motion, such as clapping, cheering, and murmuring. The results were phenomenal, and it took us only a day to design the sequence – something we never could have done using traditional simulation methods.”

Once the animated crowd simulations were complete, the data was imported into the SOFTIMAGE|XSI software for final rendering in mental ray®, where lighting and other attributes were assigned to match the other scenes in the sequence. “I’m really pleased with the final shot,” added Richard. “Based on our experience with SOFTIMAGE|BEHAVIOR, I won’t hesitate to propose complex crowd scenes in future projects. In fact, I imagine we’ll be using SOFTIMAGE|BEHAVIOR to create even more complex scenes for future games, and with greater numbers of characters.”

“SOFTIMAGE|BEHAVIOR is an advanced crowd simulation and animation technology with applications far beyond just the film industry,” said Gareth Morgan, Product Manager at Softimage. “Ubisoft’s ‘Rainbow Six 3’ is another great example of how gamers are leveraging the same revolutionary CG technology used in feature films to raise the quality of games – and ultimately, create end-user experiences that look and feel like the real thing. We’re pleased to see customers like Ubisoft using Softimage tools to push the envelope on these types of projects and get results that meet all their needs.”