- MC Velocirapper
- |
- Exalted Member
Halo Wars' cutscenes were pre-rendered cut scenes done by the animation house Blur http://www.blur.com/movies/halowars.html.
If you don't know what this means...it basically boils down to the cutscenes in Halo Wars are pre-rendered video files that are not confined to the restrictions of having to run real time in a game engine.
Pre-rendered = you dont have to worry about the limitations of running 30fps in engine. Theoretically when it comes to CG you can shoot for the moon when it comes to things like a dense poly count, dynamic lighting, caustics, effects, complex shaders, and a whole slew of other heavy processing things in the art of 3d. When pre-rendered cg movies are produced (ie: pixar, dreamworks, etc) it can take a farm of multiple computers working together many hours if not entire days to render a single frame of the animation depending on the resolution how mathematically complex the scene is to render...many other factors go into this as well but yeah...it takes a lot of CPU power to render out CG films. Pixar has their own render farm just because of how long it takes to render out the final version of their movies.
Anywho, bottom line is pre-renedered cutscenes definitely can look like AAA hollywood 3d movies/special effects, however consoles and PCs are a long way out from being able to render graphics of that quality real time in an engine.
This concludes my little dose of reality.
[Edited on 11.01.2009 6:57 PM PST]