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Ling on the progress in general. "The title has been in DVCC's capable hands now for a number of weeks -- this was a very complex authoring job -- and the builds I've seen so far have been working |
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really well," he reports. "The two authoring guys at DVCC --Daniel Milstein and Derek Haase -- were real troopers, and did an amazing job realizing my navigation design." Van has been going through a rigorous process to assure the quality of the material together with the folks at DVCC and James Cameron's production company Lightstorm Entertainment. Although most of the material was ready to go, a few tweaks were necessary to accommodate the immediate needs of the project, and to fix some typos that had made their way into the many thousands of text screens on the disc. Van is relieved that no major changes were necessary and that his elaborate preparation of all the materials has ultimately paid off. "With this much material, organization was all-important. Literally thousands of stills had to be kept in order, yet interspersed with video and branching choices. By working out file naming conventions and creating a massive flowchart, I think we were able to turn an impossible authoring job into merely an extremely difficult one."Van was kind enough to make material available to us that nicely shows the various stages of development for some of the menu screens he has been working on for the |
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release, and we begin to talk about his approach to the disc's menu system."At first you try to figure out exactly what the different elements are that you have, and you begin to build a navigation system around those logical entities. You know you have storyboards, featurettes, trailers and all these single elements, and the navigation system needs to organize and arrange them all somehow. You have to decide where the cities on your map are before you build the road, so to say," he explains with a laugh. "Once you have that, you try to figure out what the best way would be to make them work, you establish routes how to get there. This is pretty much the mandate for any menu designer, but I think we had a few dozen other goals and considerations than most titles. For the entire menu system of the release, we followed a single, cohesive theme. You are in the Sub Bay and you have all those doors with things behind them. It is all designed as a continuous environment that is fully animated. |
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This is the first step in the creation of the Cast and crew biography menu for “The Abyss”. A hand-sketched design gives a general impression of the graphic layout and the available menu entries. |
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Detail has been added to the texture maps used in this rendering to create the atmosphere of an organic environment with sugged surfaces. |
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