Arma 3 Contact – Announcement Trailer

Contact Expansion is an ambitious DLC for Arma 3. Sandbox elements and singleplayer campaign revolving around first contact with extraterrestial intelligence is a very unusual theme for an authentic military sandbox.

Key goal of the announcement trailer was to introduce core themes of the expansion and tease the singleplayer campaign. For this it was decided that more cinematic and story-driven form will be best suited. However, the entire trailer is built and captured in-game.

The trailer is built around one of the missions in the singleplayer campaign and revolves around a squad of soldiers sent to investigate what is believed to be an extraterrestrial phenomenon.

Animation

To be able to visually tell the story of four soldiers about to make history, we needed the appropriate animation. Unfortunately, Arma 3 has quite shallow animation pool. For certain scenes there were no usable animations and for some, only animations that audence has seen several times already could be used. This led to the decision to motion capture custom animations specifically for the trailer. The final animlist was not expansive – counting around 10 bespoke animations for the trailer in total – but given Arma 3’s unusual animation pipeline, it still presented interetsing challenge. The extra effort was well worth it however, because new animations allowed for more visually seamless experience and also proved valuable to the game’s modding community.

Voice Acting

With the need to tell more intricate story came the requirement to invest more energy into voice acting. This was yet another unexplored territory for Arma 3 trailer and it was possibly the first time Arma trailer featured in-person dialogue. Since Arma 3 lacks any real facial animation, camera work in dialogue was made significantly easier by characters wearing full CBRN suits – hiding their faces.

Pacing

The fact that new Arma 3 expansion was going to feature extraterrestrial intelligence was held secret until this trailer was released. For this reason we decided to withold any explicit mentions of this until the last shot. The tempo of this trailer is deliberatly slower. To maintain gradation we iterated through about eight different versions of the final sequence featuring various reveals of the alien ship and gravitational phenomena.

Camera

Previous experience with Arma 3 has shown that the scripted camera movement has several weaknesses. It is visually very static and often stutters in more subtle movements. This is caused by quantization error inherent to the design of the camera feature. It also doesn’t allow nonlinear interpolation so it cannot ease-in, or ease-out any variable. For these reasons I decided to rather use simulated hand-held camera as much as possible. For camera movements that needed to be steady (like the opening shot) I used a workaround where the camera is attached to one invisible game object and tracks another. Both of those objects are then manually animated to allow for smoother movement. This is then supported by PoV shots from the UGV perspective.

Since the entire trailer takes place during the night, special care had to be put into making sure the image had good visibility on various screens. To maintain better control and details in shadows, the entire trailer was captured with an in-game camera exposure and increased gamma. IRE waveform monitor hooked-up to the capture PC was used to maintain roughly equivalent brightness across scenes. Everything was then brought back down in post with more granular control over image brightness.

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