To promote the speed and quality of ATI Technologies’ new graphics card the Radeon X1800, rhinofx, New York, has created The Assassin–the third installation in a series of technical demonstrations featuring the character Ruby.
Prior to this project, the team at rhinofx created The Double Cross and Dangerous Curves to demonstrate the technical capabilities of the ATI Radeon X800 and Radeon X850 graphics cards, respectively. All three pieces involve Ruby facing dangerous adversaries in a futuristic environment.
“If you compare Double Cross, which was the first one, with The Assassin, even to the lay person, you can see that there is a lot more going on and a lot more detail and the visual quality has been [improved],” related Callan McInally, manager of ATI’s 3D application research group. “To the educated user, somebody who works in game development or something like that, they’ll immediately notice that the number of environments there is much greater, the number of polygons is much greater, the shadows have moved from being hard shadows to soft shadows, there’s a bunch of subtle things like that.”
Rhinofx’s director/creative director Harry Dorrington, who was also the writer on the films, explained that a polygon is “a wire mesh that makes up the amount of facets you can have to make up a model. So the more polygons, the more detail I can get into the model.”
CREATIVE ALLIANCE
Though ATI has an in-house demo team made up of a few programmers and artists, for the new products they were launching, McInally said they needed to “kick things up a level.” To do that, they either had to significantly expand their internal team or find an expert partner.
After talking with several studios, McInally said rhinofx was the right choice because it understood what the company needed creatively and technically, including the “unique aspect of doing something in real time.”
To explain the element of real time, McInally compared it to spots or movies. For those media, he said, artists create computer graphics and will render out a sequence of frames that are played back at 30 frames a second. “What we do here is everything’s rendered at 30 frames a second, so every 30th of a second the graphics card is actually calculating the scene, which means that the camera work isn’t fixed. So the user can pick up the mouse on one of our demos and can move the world around and everything is rendered out sort of in full realism running at 30 frames a second.”
On ATI’s Web site at www.ati.com/ruby, the company provides a movie version of The Assassin, which is a linear story that doesn’t require the graphics card. This will give you a sense of the story and its design. They also offer the demo, which requires the graphics card, at www.ati.com/developer/demos/rx1800.html.
“If you actually have the executable version that you can run on your computer with one of our graphics boards in it — if you pick up the mouse and move it around, the demo will actually freeze and it will let you fly around inside the environment at that point–so you can actually freeze the action.” McInally shared. “Imagine you’re a cinematographer and you shouted freeze and everybody that was acting suddenly froze and then you could move around the world, and it’s exactly like that–just by moving the mouse around, you can just fly around in the world.”
The graphics card Radeon X1800 was created for PCs; The Assassin, as previously mentioned, was meant to demonstrate its capabilities. However, Microsoft approached ATI to help them sell the graphics capabilities of the new XBOX 360 because ATI provided the graphic chip (Xenos) that goes in the console. To best demonstrate the gaming console’s capabilities, ATI adapted The Assassin to the XBOX hardware and the demo ran at this year’s Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angles, a trade show for interactive entertainment and educational software. The Assassin was also shown at SIGGRAPH.
ICONIC BRANDING
In addition to promoting its products, ATI wanted to create a character that would be a brand icon. For rhinofx managing director and partner Rick Wagonheim, this project was a bit different from the shop’s normal work because of the creative freedom involved. “Nobody ever comes to a studio with an absolutely blank canvas and gives us the opportunity to totally create the icon, which has somewhat been just conversation and more conceptual at that point,” he said.
For Dorrington, the project was different from typical commercial and film work because of the ATI technology inherent in the job. “We had to create the stuff in a way that is very disciplined and very controlled,” the writer/director noted. “So the models have to be built in a very precise way, the texture space has to be built in a very economical way.” He explained that he was working to ensure maximum quality in a minimal amount of space because the content has to load into a computer in a reasonable amount of time and space.
“This is totally alien to what we would normally be doing in commercials or film work and it’s that which is the biggest challenge, it’s creating cinematic imagery that is going to sell the illusion, the fantasy that they wanted to achieve and getting that to happen,” Dorrington said.
The three films featuring the character Ruby were targeted to a worldwide audience and she has become especially popular in Asia. McInally also explained that ATI has a gaming enthusiast following and Ruby has managed to move beyond that core group to appeal to the mainstream. “Ruby sort of became the corporate icon for ATI. We used her not only at the gaming tradeshows but at all the other trade shows and in a bunch of magazine advertisements and on box artwork or products,” he said.
Though he wasn’t sure about the details, the ATI manager related that there have been Ruby look-alike contests abroad and one of the company’s partners created a Ruby doll. “It’s been a huge testament to the success of Ruby as a brand,” McInally noted.
Wagonheim doesn’t think anyone expected the strong hold Ruby has garnered as an icon. “Nobody anticipated that they would wind up merchandising a doll. They had all anticipated that it would be a global asset but not to the point where there would be live contestants vying to become the live Ruby and it just became a groundswell that grew and grew.”