Pizza
Connection 2 was a great challenge for the graphics department
at Software 2000. In contrast to the predecessor Pizza
Syndicate which was designed in colorful comic style, this
version should get a realistic look. In the early stages of
development we decided to render the town's ground layer instead
of assembling it from single modules. This method provided the
advantage of realistic shading, shadows, reflections and light
effects. Therefore we needed to integrate our stand-alone tools
like level editors into Maya's workflow. We needed to create
detailed ground layers for ten towns.
Another
challenging task was the development of 56 individual hires
characters, that were meant to populate the Pizza Connection
world. With a team of three 3D artists we managed to animate
the characters within three month. Carla Heinzel was responsible
for design and modeling of the characters. Marco Windrich prepared
the characters for animation by creating the animation setup.
Dirk Bialluch animated the characters and rendered the final
2D sprites. We had at least 12 different animation cycles for
each character going up to a maximum of 24 for action units.
Without automating some time consuming processes using custom
tools we would not have managed to deliver this amount of graphics
within that short time frame. All walk cycles were done using
the Footstep System programmed by Dirk Bialluch in early 1999
in the framework of a research project. For final rendering
he developed a MEL script that rendered the sprite animation
cycles fully automated in eight directions and two sizes (town
and pizzeria view) with proper file naming.
Please
refer to this page for more information about the Making Of
Pizza Connection 2.
At
the end of the production Dirk Bialluch and Alex Knorr spent
a few evenings to compose the Pizza Connection 2 credits tune.
The credits movie follows the example of James Bond introductions.
Thus it was pretty clear we had use brasses as dominant instrument.
Alex soon came up with a catchy tune and we added it using Akai
S1000 guitar samples. Almost every other instrument like brasses
and drums come from an Akai S1000. We recorded several different
audio layer and edited them digitally using Vegas where we could
directly view the resulting movie. Some markant parts we accompanied
with sound effects recorded at Software 2000's recording studio.
