How do video game developers incorporate custom characters into cutscenes?
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In a traditional pre-rendered cutscene, it’s a movie file — every frame was pre-calculated by the developer, possibly using extra time (e.g. multiple seconds / minutes to calculate a single frame), and/or a more powerful computer. Since it’s just playing a movie, the cutscene can have better graphics than the user’s computer can produce.
If your character’s appearing with their equipment, it’s likely an “In-engine cutscene.” Basically the game keeps rendering the graphics as it normally would during gameplay, but have the characters and camera follow a pre-scripted sequence of actions (taking away movement and camera control from the player).
Basically a “custom character cutscene” isn’t “play a movie the developer made and saved,” instead it’s “normal gameplay but temporarily disable the control you usually have over your character and the camera, and change characters’ behaviors so everybody moves and talks according to a script.” In other words, there’s no movie file, your computer’s calculating frames “on the fly” just as it would during normal gameplay. The main difference is that your controls are disabled and the game uses a different set of rules for what the characters do.
An in-engine cutscene is usually way less expensive for the developer than a pre-rendered one. Since it’s displaying characters the same way they are in normal gameplay, as a bonus things like customized outfits are basically free (in terms of development effort) — you just have the game display the character the same way it normally does.
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