Famitsuu Xbox 360 Magazine’s interview series, “Behind the Scenes of Vana’diel”, continues this month with part 3 of the interview done with the Effects Team. Part 1 covered some of the basics about the team and the many things they are responsible for. Part 2 contained some interesting tidbits about things that go unnoticed as well as how the team adds sounds and vibrations to effects in the game. In the last part of this interview, part 3, the team talks about background effects, some of the difficulties they face while working, and what they’d like people to notice about the work they do.

As a reminder, the Effects Team is currently made up of 3 people. In charge of the team is the animated and energetic Yuuko Hatae who is assisted by Kouji Tsutsui and Yuuko Tashiro.

This interview contains spoilers for things that appear in some cut scenes for WotG.

The Job of the Effects Team (Part 3)


The Effects Team makes every single effect in FFXI, from magic and job abilities to the cloud of dust behind a running chocobo. This is the last part of our interview with the three members of the team, Yuuko Hatae, Kouji Tsutsui, and Yuuko Tashiro. We talked about background effects, some of the difficulties they face when making effects, and what each of the members would like people to notice about the work they do.

——————–[The Background Effects That Decorate Vana'diel]——————–

–What specifically is a background effect?

Tashiro: Like waterfalls or water… the things that make up the scenery.

Hatae: There are animals and stuff right? Like fish swimming in the rivers, birds flying, etc. Those are also background effects.

Tsutsui: The light from torches and lamps are too.

Hatae: The fireflies too. If you get close to them, they start to glow. There are bugs that crawl on the floor of the Aydeewa Subterrane. Then there are the spiders who run away from you, but if you get too close, they’ll suddenly climb up and disappear. We make those things here within our team as background effects.

–Sounds like the background effects are all the things that naturally enter our field of vision when we play, but don’t really consciously think of. Are the weather effects “background effects” too?

Hatae: Those we don’t create by ourselves. The Art and Background Model Teams work with us to create them.

–You have a lot of tricks up your sleeves. Other things I can think of when it comes to scenery include the dolphins that jump out of the water when you ride the Manaclipper and the dragon that flies over the lake in Lufaise Meadows.

Hatae: It’s effects like those where you can really see the personality of the effect designer in charge of that particular area. It’s more fun if there is something there to discover, whether it is something that surprises you suddenly or something so gorgeous that you can’t take your eyes off of it. We try to think of these extras based on where the player will be looking. We also learned about some little extras added into the game by some previous members of the FFXI Team (Sakie Kawazaki and Hiroyuki Sutou). We can set effects to trigger at certain times so there are a few places in the game here and there where something will appear at a particular time.

–Do you include these just for fun?

Hatae: Pretty much. (laughs) It’s like… if somebody notices it, it makes it fun for us.

Tsutsui: There are things in the game even people who are working on it now don’t know about. (laughs)

–That’s pretty interesting.

Hatae: If you stay in the same place all day long, there’s a chance something might change.

–Are the ghosts in Gusgen Mines also considered effects?

Hatae: Yes.

–Those are kind of scary, aren’t they?

Hatae: They are. But I bet it was fun for the person that made them. (laughs) That siren in there is also kind of surprising. Those kinds of noises are also added by the Effects Team as part of background effects. They can be attached to the background. For example, with rivers, we attach the sound to the location of the river. We can also attach sounds to when a volcano erupts.

–So they are done together as a set. How do you make the sound clips?

Hatae: The sound clips are made by the Sound Effects Team and then we add them to the effects we’ve made. We can also have sound effects go off at a certain time. So there can be nighttime sounds at night but then the sound of birds during the daytime.

–So you decide on the timing as well. When we as players are inside the game, all the sounds are so natural we don’t really think about them, but you really put a lot of effect into making them.

Tashiro: Sorry to derail the conversation for the moment but there was a time where we all went to a Hot Spring resort together for a company trip. The person in charge of sound effects kept trying to record a bunch of different things, like the sound of the river, etc, so he didn’t get any rest at all! (laughs)

Hatae: He went around recording the sound of walking on top of snow, walking on top of the icy ground, etc.

Tashiro: It was pretty funny.

Tsutsui: I was surprised how into his work he was.

–If you don’t record that kind of stuff when you get the chance, you’d have to go out of your way to record it later, which probably isn’t an easy thing to do I imagine.

Hatae: We also took pictures of a lot of things like the ice and the snow. (laughs)

Tashiro: I took pictures of icicles and stuff. I kept thinking maybe I could use it for a texture someday.

——————–[The Hardships of the Effects Team]——————–

–It seems like there are a lot of things the players haven’t discovered yet. You work so hard and yet they go unnoticed.

Hatae:When it comes to cut scenes, we do a lot of detailed work but a lot of times I think people aren’t going to notice it.

Tashiro: It’s a bit of a shock when you work on something and then only a tiny bit of it gets included in the final cut scene because of the camera angle. (laughs)

Tsutsui: In one of the WotG quests, there is a scene where Lehko eats a fish. You don’t see it in the cut scene due to the camera angle that was chosen for the final release but we had actually prepared the tail and bones too. (laughs)

Hatae: If a player’s character holds an item, say a fish or lizard, we can’t show that so we’d get told the camera angle will be from behind the player. But this time we even took the time to make the polygon skeleton for the object. (laughs) And then it wasn’t even on screen!

–It’d be nice if you could put it to use somewhere else in the future. (laughs)

Tashiro: I’d like to use it again as a little side thing somewhere. (laughs) Another example I can think of isn’t an object but… there is a scene where the young Rahal cries. It’s the scene where an adult Elvaan dies during “In a Haze of Glory” in Garlaige Citadel. I paid a lot of attention to detail when making his tears but none of it ended up on screen! (cries)

Hatae: What appears in the cut scenes all depends on the final camera angle chosen.

–It sounds like you end up making a lot of things that don’t even end up on screen. The cut scenes lately are getting quite long. And very elaborate.

Tashiro: They are long…

Hatae: Lately, there are more scenarios where visuals are important, and there are a lot more action scenes than in the past. Also, with WotG, you have different tracks of quests for each of the three nations all going on at the same time. I think the Event Planning and Motion Teams must be under a lot of pressure too. If there is an action scene included in the quests for one nation then they feel like they have to include one in the other nations as well. (laughs) Because of this, the number of cut scenes with a lot of action has grown. And then on top of that, if we are making quest cut scenes this amazing, the ones for the actual missions have to be even more amazing! (laughs)

Tashiro: The bar keeps getting raised. (laughs) The slow motion scenes are hard to create. It’s not like we have a magic function that lets us turn a regular scene into slow motion. Anything that needs to be slow motion has to be made to look that way.

Tsutsui: The transition between regular time and slow motion is especially hard to do.

Hatae:Let’s say there is a particle of something that flies out while the cut scene is in regular time mode. When you switch into slow motion, you can’t have it fly out at the same speed as before because that’d be weird. So, making sure it doesn’t look very obvious, we make the regular time mode particles disappear, add in special slow motion particles, and then when we go back to regular time mode, we put the normal ones back in. So we try to trick your eyes while we build the cut scene.
A lot of times things like dust and sand are used along with a motion, basically, there are a lot of things that are very detailed, but you don’t really get to see them…. (laughs) At those times when it would be unnatural to just have whatever motion the character is doing, we can make smoke or scraps of random junk or something fly through the air as an effect. Each one of those pieces are handcrafted by us.

Tashiro: When I work on a scene that has running chocobos, it’s like “oh my gosh they ran five steps!”. (laughs) You have to add countless dots to make up the dust for each individual step.

Tsutsui: It’s also really hard when they are come from far away, because it doesn’t all fit on the screen. You have to think about it from a broader perspective.

–You have to work on all of the cut scenes right? That’s an enormous amount of work!

Hatae:For each version update, there are around 50 to 60 cut scenes. There are big projects like a certain someone’s super powerful magic or when Lilisette goes into action. Then there is more detailed work like creating the grass that gets brushed away from somebody’s bottom after they fall on their backside.

–Sounds like there is no end to the list of examples you could give me.

Tashiro: Right before a deadline, there are many times I’m rushing to the station to barely catch the last train home. (laughs)

——————–[Check Out This Effect!]——————–

–Finally, I’d like to ask if there are any effects you’ve created that you really like or that you would like players to pay attention to.

Hatae: As for recent things… I really put a lot of effort into that scene where Lilith makes her appearance. It’s like “ooo sexy”. (laughs) Other than that, I’d say the three newish weapon skills for Automatons.

–You’re talking about “Armor Piercer”, etc, right?

Hatae: We worked really hard to get that drilling feeling. (laughs)

Tsutsui: There’s nothing that really stands out for me but I’d like people to notice how FFXI has changed over time and how each period is different. You could call it the proof of how we’ve grown. (laughs) The effects we make for the game now are completely different from those when the game first started. I’d like people to notice the difference.

Tashiro: There are also times you can tell what we’re really into. (laughs)

Tsutsui: That’s true. It’s like… the way we express ourselves. There are periods where we’ll do a lot of flashy effects where things go flying. Then there are periods where we are very particular about the textures we use. It changes from time to time. For example with textures, we’ll work hard to match up the ends of the texture so that you can’t tell when it starts and ends when you are scrolling by. It’s those little details we get picky about. I’m not really sure if that makes sense but if people get a sense of it when they play, that’d make me happy.

Tashiro: I’d like people to pay attention to the fire in the recently added quest for Gadalar called “Embers of His Past”. I put a lot of work into the flames that circle around with the weapon. The effect was set to go off along with the movement of the base skeleton underlying the motion. However, the actual motion was too quick so the flame wouldn’t appear connected. You’d get little spots where it was disconnected by one or two bits. Because of that, to get the actual ring effect, I had to make it separate from the motion. (Begins to try to explain using a lot of hand and body motions) To get it to turn like this…. if I turn it like this… then first I have to make this part…. then make that part…. and turn it like this…. and then set it so that only this part goes off…. It was really difficult!

–That’s going to be hard to explain to the readers in words. (laughs) I’ll make sure to watch the cut scene again later!

Hatae: The world of FFXI is very large! In addition to the battle effects, there are effects in the scenery that appear depending on what time it is or what the current weather is, etc. If you change your point of view and look around, you might just discover something new.

——————————————————–
That ends the interview series with the Effects Team! Stay tuned for additional hidden effects the current Effects Team learned from their predecessors in an upcoming post.