Pre-rendered cutscene restoration

[Guest 3841499]

Pre-rendered cutscene restoration

There are a few cutscenes in the game that were pre-rendered from actual gameplay-cutscenes. The cutscene at the end of the into/tutorial when Wild Hunt arrives is one of such scenes and the scene right before Wyzima is divided, where part is in-game cutscene and part is pre-rendered. I am curious if any of the pre-rendered scenes have in-game scene remnants. It would be really cool to restore them if content is still there, but would probably require a ton of work.

 

[Guest 2364765]

None besides environment files.

/thread.

 

[Guest 3841499]

Any ideas why CDPR cut them out like that?

 

[Guest 2364765]

Most likely because they couldn't get the scene to look like they wanted it to on target hardwares (most likely consoles being the issue) so they said fuck it and just ran it on a good PC and recorded it.

Reality is that we don't know and most likely will never know.

 

[Riven-Twain]

I'm not certain, but I believe these scenes were pre-rendered in order to control variables such as lighting, levels of detail, and insure that certain special effects and animations appeared without aberrations (such as interference caused by background in-game elements). That's just a guess, though.

 

[PloughEnthusiast]

What about the intro cutscene where Geralt is asleep? Right after the CGI intro, the camera zooms in on the crystal bird skull, then zooms out and you see an in-engine cutscene of the two Witchers sleeping. This cutscene is very janky for me. The camera pans are fucked up and stutter a lot. Am I the only one experiencing this?

Sorry to hijack this thread for this question, but it seemed relevant enough. I always wondered whether that scene was prerendered.

 

[KoalaNalle]

I hate prerendered game engine cutscenes. Mass Effect is full of them. Luckily there are just couple in W3.

These have vastly poorer fidelity than game engine cutscenes and look just plain ugly. I blame consoles on this. Take a look at the Battle of Kaer Morhen, there's aspects that would've taken more than couple of weeks of optimising to make that run on consoles. I think it's just lazy or then there's time constraints. Latter being the cause of some absolutely horrible cutscenes in Final Fantasy VII

Also those prerendered cutscenes and DLC outfits don't match.

 

[SigilFey]

Heh heh heh...time was when we looked at pre-rendered cutscenes and thought, "Oh...if only the actual game could look like that. That would be awesome...!"

As for the stuttering with the opening video / crystal skull / transition to the in-game engine:

I experienced chops and pops with it only under certain versions. I don't think I've ever had any issues with the opening after 1.13-ish. Don't have any stutters under vanilla 1.31. (Instead, the problem I couldn't get rid of was the mane and tail of the horses disappearing. Still happens on the rare occasion. )

I would imagine this could be an issue if using mods that replace textures, increase lod, etc. Since much of the game streams instead of pre-loads assets, the initial "cache" of assets to RAM when you first load into the game could be taking much longer than under vanilla conditions. Just a guess. (Try capping the frames at 30, Vsync On and see if the stuttering happens then. If it stutters, it's likely loading and has nothing to do with performance. If the stutter goes away, that might be indicative of some process getting ahead of itself.)

 

[PloughEnthusiast]

Maybe it's because I use a GSync monitor.

 

[Guest 3841499]

I don't find anything particularly demanding in visuals in those pre-rendered cutscenes...

 

[erxv]

The tools you need to recreate the scenes are available. Though im sure the reason they were made into videos would become apparent. Scenes like that usually have long distances between some camera shots and loading an entirely new view in 1 frame is not really possible. You can test this by making just a very simple scene with the tools i linked and making the distance between 2 cameras over 50 meters or so, and changing from one to another sometimes takes as long as a couple seconds. (even on an SSD)

https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1346 - w2scene encoder
https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2114 - Storyboard UI

 

[Guest 3841499]

Thanka! We're those the tools used to make your TW1 prologue?

Changing camera takes 2 seconds and yet making a 180 degree turn during the game doesn't. Yet, the effect is the same - immediate change of scenery in short amount of time, although in-game change does go through a transition in-between sceneries.

 

[Guest 2364765]

Thanka! We're those the tools used to make your TW1 prologue?

Changing camera takes 2 seconds and yet making a 180 degree turn during the game doesn't. Yet, the effect is the same - immediate change of scenery in short amount of time, although in-game change does go through a transition in-between sceneries.

Loading of entities is distance based, not FOV based. Hence moving camera instantly more than ~30 meters in game does trigger fading and rotating it does not.

 

[SorceressJ]

I really would love to have hese pre-rendered scenes in the regular game graphics, too. Would fit better and the switch to pre-rendered always look like a downgrade to me.

 

[Guest 3841499]

So they could have just used that blurry screen load thingy. It happens in between Kaer Morhen battle cutscenes anyway. Or they could have used camera from a distance to just rotate.

Anyway, we can't restore it.

In exploring FX files, I deduced that quite a bit of content indended to be in the game was cut out. There were supposed to be burning fields and houses in White Orchard that we never got to see...

 

[JUANMAS7ER]

You can see burning houses on White Orchard, but it will be a spoiler. Hint, explore the area during the epilogue.