Takashi Mizutani
-CG Artist-
Bold black font = Interviewer
Regular black font = Mizutani
Could you briefly introduct yourself, please?
First of all, I was working in a visual design room where I was rendering CG animation. Then I entered Mr. Kojima's team and I've been working on Metal Gear Solid since then.
Which parts of the game are the CG team involved in?
We deal with all of the real time CG that you see during the game. For example, all the polygon models, both characters and scenery, polygon textures, the real-time polygon demos, visual effects and camera work.
Originally, Metal Gear had CG movies, but these have been replaced with real-time scenes. Why did you make this decision?
That first release video which we put out was actually an artist's representation. From the very beginning we intended to use the PlayStation to acreate a complete real-time game. However, at that time we didn't have any visual materials that we could show, so we made a CG movie instead. We never show that movie again because we don't think it was very good. We've now improved our design techniques considerably, so if we wanted to, we could make a better movie.
What benefits do yo8u get with real-time over the traditional CG movie?
I think that from hereafter, real-time will become the new standard. There's no emotion in a CG movie. We're not the first to try this. Crash Bandicoot also uses real-time as well. Technically they're the same, but where as Crash uses real-time just for some in-game animation, we use it to create whole movies. However, in order to take a movie-like apporoach to the living real-time like MGS does requires a large amount of pre-work with story boarding.
What is involved in the production of real-time cut scenes?
First we receive the scenario. After looking at that, Mr. Toyota, the motion designer, creates the storyboard and starts working on all the motion that is needed for that scene. We then take this and use a special in-house polygon animation tool called Polygo Namie to create all the in-game polygon models. Following the scenario we match all the motion to the speech, and then on top of this we add all the camera as well.
How many 3D models were produced for Metal Gear in total?
Not including the characters, there are about 700 models just related to the scenery alone. In total, that's over a thousand models.
Did each team members supervise a different aspect of the CG?
Of course, the scenery is the main work. More than the characters themselves, the background is what everyone sees the most. There are eight people in the CG team and each of them were given their own stage to create. Each of them has their own specialist field such as buildings or mechanics, so they do the stage most appropriate to their skills.
What's your working relationshiop to Mr. Shinkawa?
Mr. Shinkawa is really the artist. When we are designing the characters and the stages, our first customer to please is Mr. Shinkawa. We show him our designs and get his opinions on them. His input into the design process is very important. Usually, we take his designs and create the CG, but he concentrates on the characters, not the scenery. For the scenery we have a lot of photographs, etc., which we use to create the backgrounds. Then, after we've finished them, Mr. Shinkawa checks our designs.
Did you have any special difficulties designing within such a dark game environment?
It was Mr. Kojima's concept to have a very dark, almost monochrome color scheme throughout the game. However, this means that we can't use color as an eye-catch. In most games, it's easy to show the player where he should be aiming for by making the objective very bright and colorful, but we couldn't do this so easily in MGS, which is very dark and plain. To get around this, instead of using color we used light and darkness. By creating a single bright light we can create shadows as well, and by using these we can highlight areas in the stages.
Do you need the assistance of the programmers to create some of the special effects?
Usually effects such as the ghosting and motion blur and also special effects that affect the whole screen, such as when you're looking out from under the water or when the lightness of an area goes up and down, are created by the programmers.
Did you get any ideas from looking at the CG in other computer games?
We have one person who plays a lot of games, and he gave us loads of ideas for special effects. The programmers worked hard to recreate almost all of the really good effects that we discovered in other PlayStation games. For example, making the shadows exactly the same shape as the object, putting the background out of focus when the camera is focused on a foreground object.
Before you started work on MGS was there anything you had really wanted to do in the game?
Most of the CG in Japanese games is very bright and clean but I like dirty CG. I wanted to use blur and noise and use the focus in different ways. This time the most important thing was the atmosphere to the game.
Which part of the game are you most proud of?
We did a good job in creating the ghost blur. MGS uses real-time throughout and we managed to capture that movie-like quality through this effect. It's not really that noticeable, but that's because we've done it so well. We wouldn't want it to stand out and get in the way.