Although I’m not a big fan of “Guild Wars”, this trailer (at least the first part) is amazing… the music is absolutely brilliant, and the special transition effects just put me in the mood for some epic-ness… Brilliant work…
I’m wondering if you can do something similar to the transition effects in the first part of the trailer with realtime 3d graphics and some nice juicy shaders… You could go around it by creating a “stroke map”, by analyzing the direction of the surfaces you render and use that as a basis for a “paint stroke” effect that would fill the screen with the painted scene. To do the depth effects, you could “clamp” the Z of the objects to specific depths before transforming them to screen space, doing “layers” of an ortho-perspective… I’d love to have the time to experiment around with this…