How Space Office Brought Trailmakers to Life with an Acti...

After 20 years working on everything from Hollywood and Netflix shows to Annie-award-winning game animation, the team at boutique VFX studio Space Office knows how to tell a great story. However, they faced a new challenge on their latest game trailer project for Trailmakers 2.0: Pioneers an update to Flashbulb Games's popular Trailmakers.

Trailmakers is a sandbox game, where players are free to explore the world by building their own car, airplane, robot, or helicopter, says Co-Owner of Space Office, Jonas Ussing. The trailer needed to tell a story that would attract new players, while appealing to the existing Trailmaker fanbase.

The result is a 60-second animation that unveils the game's backstory: how the main character took a spaceship to arrive on the planet where Trailmakers 2.0 is set. Created in just four months, the trailer acts as a prologue that ends where the game begins, allowing the player to take over after.

From Concept to Final Render

To create the trailer, the Space Office team began by developing a story idea from Flashbulb Games. Having already worked together on three trailers for Flashbulb's Rubber Bandits, pre-production was seamless. For Trailmakers 2.0: Pioneers, Flashbulb Games tasked us to create a trailer that could also function as the opening cinematic, says Space Office's other Co-Owner, Stine S rensen. Together, we adapted their original idea into a 22-shot storyboard. We also worked closely with the game's art director to begin designing a sci-fi film look that wouldn't deviate too far from the in-game aesthetic.

Once the story was approved by Flashbulb Games, the Space Office team translated the storyboard from 2D drawings into a 3D animatic with the help of Flashbulb's in-game assets, which were upressed to high-resolution render assets using Maya. This enabled the Space Office team to perfect the animatic by adjusting timing and camera angles to get the best flow between shots.

The story reel then progressed from blocking to final animation, which was regularly uploaded to shot management system ftrack for client feedback. Once the animation was polished, the animation cache was brought into shot assembly in 3ds Max, along with simulation effects from tyFlow and Chaos Phoenix. Each shot was then rendered in V-Ray using Chaos Cloud.

Making Trailers Accessible

For Space Office, the finished Trailmakers 2.0 project represents a solution for any game developer that has limited time or budget to commission a VFX studio for a trailer.

Because of our size and approach to projects, we can work super fast and find smart ways to save a lot of resources, says Ussing. For example, with Trailmakers 2.0, we worked with Flashbulb Games to recycle as many in-game assets as possible, helping to save days of production time. We upressed the geometry on props and vehicles where needed and replaced the real-time textures with photoreal render materials. The main character also got a complete modeling and texture overhaul and a brand new rig for more detailed animation.

The Space Office team also saved time by kitbashing environments such as the space station and generating planet landscapes using tyFlow. High-resolution tyFlow landscapes could be generated in minutes and run in real-time in the viewport, which meant the team could get detailed landscape comments from Flashbulb Games before leaving previz.

We even made lighting and rendering more efficient by rendering in a single beauty pass, with light sources split up for compositing, says S rensen. We tweaked each light source in Nuke in ACES colorspace for a more filmic look, where we used a template script that auto-composited the passes with setups for lens distortion, grain and chromatic aberration. This made finishing super fast as minimal per-shot compositing was needed.

With Chaos Cloud, the team could then render shots at a low resolution quickly, assemble the whole film with the temp renders and get the lighting and look of each shot approved before sending it on to final resolution rendering. This final render took hours rather than days, thanks to Chaos Cloud.

The Future of Game Trailers

Now that Trailmakers 2.0 is complete, the Space Office team hopes to help more game developers make their trailer dreams come true. A client can come to us with an idea, and we will use our 20 years of industry film experience to shape it into a story and create a Hollywood-quality trailer, says Ussing. That won't just help to get the attention of new players. It can also help gain attention from publishers.

"We have worked with Space Office multiple times over the years and have been super happy with them, says Lasse Middelbo Outzen, Game Director at Flashbulb Games. They not only deliver awesome quality, they also contribute to the creative process and weigh in on creative decisions and direction. Some of the CGI trailers Space Office has made for us have boosted our ability to communicate ambition and value to both our audience and partners, and in several cases, this has led to us being able to make deals long before the product was playable."

Learn More

To find out more about the Trailmakers 2.0 trailer, visit spaceoffice.dk or get in touch with mail@spaceoffice.dk to arrange an interview with the Space Office team.

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