The Production of ‘Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV’

CGWORLD Japan has published a nice long interview with the creators of Kingsglave animation film. They discuss the creation of characters, environments and props.

If you still haven’t heard about it, King’s Grave Final Fantasy XV is the newest film from the acclaimed company. It serves as a little prequel to Final Fantasy XV and it looks absolutely amazing. To produce this kind of spectacle the Japanese studio had to go to great lengths.

Like a lot of other big-budget projects from Japan, which feature realistic characters (check out a feature about Resident Evil), the creators of ‘Kingsglave’ had to reserve to photogrammetry. A laborious 3d scanning was required to produce detailed main characters, which featured hundreds of details: from brows and wrinkles to teeth and eyes. A lot of the capturing work was done by a company Ten 24 from Britain. We hope to feature a little interview with these guys later. To work with the scans the artists used WrapX, ZBrush and Mudbox.

While working on the character skin color the team also did a lot of renders in the environments, to make sure that there were no unnecessary reflections or artificial look. There were a lot of additional developments, like a special shader, used to show the newly developed sweat.

The artists also had to do a lot of work with the hair, which FF characters are all very famous for. At first, the hair-dresser had to create a beautiful hairdo with a mannequin, for it to be later reproduced with Maya Hair.

Producing all the environments in-house proved to be impossible. The studio partnered with various outsourcers (overall there were more than 10 companies involved). Before the production began, Japanese artists did a starter kit of assets and textures, which was provided to external partners. They also prepared all the concept art and a bunch of reference images, which would help to control the artistic process. The control of the final assets was incredibly detailed as well.

There’s also a lot of props in the film: cars, guns, mobile phone, airships. All of these were created before the actual animation and VFX began. The team also designed the interiors of all the big props like airships. One of the films biggest props was the Audi R8. The car was reproduced using the CAD data from the manufacturer, which allowed to achieve the unprecedented level of detail. This car actually appears in the game as well.

Hopefully, we’ll have more information about the production of the film in English, cause Google Translate is still not perfect. Ten 24 is definitely going to do an article about the production. Plus if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to watch the recording of the wonderful talk by Mitsunobu Ochi and Yuichi Itoyama from Square Enix. During Zbrush Summit at Gnomon they went through the sculpt data for a character and prop models used in the film. They talked extensively about the sculpts made with Zbrush. Check out later for more updates.