How were the CGI scenes created for National Geographic series WW II Greatest Raids

Question

I've been watching a few of the World War II series on the National Geographic channel lately and they have a series called WW II Greatest raids.

In this series they provide CGI reenactments of the battles, sometimes even from a first person perspective, (examples can be seen here). The CGI looks to me almost like a PC video game.

I want to know if they had actually used a PC video game to reenact the battles or was it just purely CGI created in video software?

Answer 1

Technically speaking video games are a form of CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). For WW II Greatest Raids National Geographic worked together with Antimatter Games to create the six hours of animation. They used the Red Orchestra 2/Rising Storm game which is based on the Unreal 3 engine for creating the graphics.

Advantages of using a game enigne:

• Decent images without much effort
  • Lighting is done by the engine
  • Animations are done by the engine (think about characters walking)
  • Many models are available so you don't have to model many things any more
  • Physics are done by the engine
• Fast cycle time (game engines are designed to perform in real time, so you can check out the final result/render really fast)
• A game engine has a relatively cheap license (some are even free depending on the type of license)

Disadvantages of using a game engine:

• Due to the real time behavior you cannot expect high quality renderings
• Your animations are fixed to what the engine is capable of, think of limitations on the number of characters for example
• Might involve some programming, which you don't want to bother an animator with