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Rare Replay

How do you pack over thirty years of gaming excellence in just under two minutes? Well, we were flattered (and daunted) when our good friends at Rare came to us with this exact challenge. They wanted us to create a short video that would capture the very best of their amazing achievements in Video Games.

This project provided our team with a great opportunity to work on something that had a distinct visual style and is a slightly different approach to the style of work we’re usually known for. As ever, our team had a great time working on the piece, once again working collaboratively with one of the Games Industry’s longest surviving (and Best!) development teams in the world.

How many great games can you spot?

The Project

We already have an established pipeline for our more realistic game trailers but, we’ve adapted it somewhat to work on Rare Replay’s alternative look.

3ds Max was the main software for the trailer, using V-Ray 3.1 for rendering. The assets were modelled in 3ds Max and textured with Photoshop and Mari, paying attention to make everything look like it was made out of cardboard. The confetti effects were done with nCloth in Maya, then cached and imported into 3ds Max using Particle Flow and FumeFX.

Lighting and rendering was approached to make the scenes look like real-life miniatures, with the animation simulating the playful bounciness that these characters would portray on a small stage.

Using the OpenEXR file format, render passes were brought into After Effects where everything was composited together and graded with Magic Bullet Looks.

The entire project was managed in Shotgun, allowing for an efficient and clear way of getting the shots through the approval process internally and with the client. It was easy to configure Shotgun’s interface to let us display relevant data for each asset, shot and task, white having a clear visual feedback of how the trailer is progressing.

The Making of