I played a part in ‘Venus and Braves’. (2001-2002)
Keywords: limited stuff, retouch work of Seven Project, ‘Tanabata’, Budget and quality, the awareness for NPR,
©Namco Limited
Again, I came back to Seven Project and played a part of ‘Venus and Braves’ was the sequel to ‘Seven’. Our project’s big objective was to hold down its product cost and make profit utilizing our know-how acquired through Seven Project. So there were only two people in the character team excluding a character designer. Of course this is the sequel of ‘Seven’ so we made good use of Seven’s character data for the data of ‘Venus and Braves’, but still, there was too many character data for us two to deal with. Then we considered in which part of character data process we should increase efficiency and came to the conclusion that the retouch process was the problem.
In Seven Project, visual stuff manually retouched every rendered pictures one by one, and the difference of hand-drawn retouch among frames produced an animation an uneasy movement, and it gave the animation an attraction which matched with what Seven Project wanted.
In the Seven retouch process, we added high-lights and shadows for each picture. The number of total character was approximately 50, each character had about 10 actions, each action had 8 frames, and further, we prepared three rendered pictures (normal 3D rendering, toon paint rendering, and toon line rendering) for composite. Therefore, retouch members finally dealt with over 10,000 pictures!
Their professional had gradually heated up with the progress of the project and they finally started to draw furs, blur of eyes’ movement, lights, and even effects. Of course they were nicely finished but it took them more time. The retouch member was at first only two, but finally it amounted to over ten! Increase of the number of member engendered the quality gap among members. Then I asked the art director to have a retouch meeting to prevent it.
Thus, I thought I should avoid the manual retouch work, and at first I tried to use an another rendering method ‘Final Gathering’ by which I tried to represent the characters not hand drawn picture but kind of dolls. However, the resolution of characters on screen was low and the rendered characters could not be distinguished from normal rendering ones. At last we came to conclusion that we should use retouch. Then we asked a person from a technical support department and started making a retouch tool together.
Then I tried to make image samples using Photoshop on a parallel with modeling and motion works. At that time I accidentally met an article on a computer graphics magazine. From the article I acquired a hint of direction how to represent Seven Retouch. We had continued trial and error for about a half year and the number of version-up had been over 200, and at last, we succeeded to complete an original retouch tool, ‘Tanabata’.
'Tanabata' ©Namco Limited
*The articles about 'Tanabata' also can be seen in Japanese Game Graphics (ISBN:0-06-056772-4), Patent Storm
Using ‘Tanabata’ once you complete retouch parameter settings for each character and pushed a button, retouch, composite, and making animation data process could be completed. Then we could finish all the characters’ data with entirely satisfied quality. ‘Tanabata’ enabled us to accomplish a strong strain of visual stuff as we wanted keeping the project’s deadline, and also, it showed us a new method of 3DCG representation and its possibilities. I was able to acquire a lot of things through original retouch tool work. I was very satisfied with the result.
However, I think I could not come to the success without the experience in Seven Project. When you urged to make a tool, there must be like “why you need it” or “how you utilize it” on its basis. The basis for me was made through the experience in Seven Project; therefore, I could successfully complete Venus Project.
In 2004, ‘Tanabata’ was awarded superior patent award in the company celebrated its result.
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