[Music]
my name is Brian Poole
I am epic games media and entertainment
as a solutions engineer for all of North
America
and I'm sure you've seen a number of
really technical presentations today for
my presentation we're going to switch
gears a little bit and go up to the
30,000 foot level and take a look at the
big picture we're gonna be talking about
pipelines and workflow so I'd like to
give you a little background on myself
I've been working in the film industry
for about 17 years back in 1999 I moved
out to Hollywood California to learn a
new software package called Maya and it
was supposed to revolutionize the
animation industry and frankly I think
it did while I was out in California I
went back to school and I found that I
was in the right place at the right time
and I got a job up at Lucasfilm and at
ILM working on the new Star Wars
prequels as a previous artist and I know
what you're thinking I had nothing to do
with Jar Jar so ultimately previous
became my career and I went to work on
dozens of different movies it's kind of
like a virtual cinematographer and it
served me really well but today I'm on
this new path and I'm working in a for a
completely different kind of company so
a game company which kind of surprises
me and I'm transferring my film
experience over to embracing the Unreal
Engine so as a solutions engineer it's
my goal to assist animation and visual
effects companies integrate Unreal
Engine into their pipelines so I want to
start off with a quote from my former
boss mr. Lucas art all art is dependent
on technology because it's a human
endeavor so whenever you're using
charcoal on a wall or designing a
proscenium arch that's technology so
what was he trying to say here
essentially art pushes technology and
technology pushes art the two go
hand-in-hand like a symbiotic
relationship in and in just you know the
past five years we're seeing such a
shift in technology that once again
we're going to have to restructure our
approach to animation and VFX for film
production so the next evolution of
animation technology will unquestionably
rely on being real-time interactive
immersive programmable nonlinear and
viewer customizable our clients are
already starting to take advantage of
these capabilities and we've got a few
examples here first off is Safari this
is a new animated excuse me animated
episodic KIDS show that's being produced
by digital dimensions right here in
Montreal and it will be released in
France first in October and then
distributed in the US next year by
Universal we have barbie vlogger this is
being done by house of moves in Los
Angeles and this is a basically it's a
Mattel property and and it's a real-time
barbie variety show and Barbie and her
friends are you know taking questions
from the audience and answering them in
real time
with an actor in a mocap suit feeding
and streaming that mocap data into the
engine and broadcasting this out live
and finally some of my previous friends
from Halon entertainment we're using the
engine to create pre-visualization for
war on the planet of the apes and the
new realtime technology is really
helping directors in Hollywood you know
see their films being constructed before
they actually have to go up and shoot
them and with the engine it's even
better because they can actually get a
better sense of lighting and the
processes is quicker so this is all
great but today we're going to be
talking about fortnight and for this
presentation we're going to take a
snapshot
time to examine how the team at Epic
Games constructed this particular
trailer
so at epic we we understand that
creating animated content is not an easy
task so if we're to provide really
excellent tools for our artists there's
an expression we have to eat our own dog
food and in other words we need to use
Unreal Engine in production and you know
try it out for ourselves so we decided
to create this trailer in order to learn
all the benefits and challenges of
creating an animated short in real time
as a result there's lots of progress
being made and some of those changes and
advancements and technologies are making
it into the engine in you know 416 417
418 and onward but there's still a lot
more to do so after my presentation
there's another presentation that's
going to be given about the road map of
unreal and what's coming up in the
future and it should be interesting so
for right now let's get started and
we'll take a look at the trailer being
run in the engine in real time
all right people let's search this dump
and get out of here ASAP
dum what's wrong with the dur burger yes
no everything
garbage rats severe structural damage
some people just can't appreciate fine
dining
[Music]
did you hear that you've got nothing to
worry about
trust me I've got the heightened senses
of a ninja oh I am so sorry hey hey it's
okay we're gonna get you out of here
Wow thank you we thought you were more
of those things monsters are coming
looks like we're staying put
Knights all right you two sit with me
yes ma'am let's get to work
[Music]
I guess Meat Is Murder you killing me
man oh okay that's up to the referee
back from the part where we almost died
it was amazing hey don't mention it it's
all of the Nights work
all right guys who's up for pizza
[Music]
I can't begin to tell you how many times
I've heard that song alright let's see
here so let's talk about setting goals
of what was expected for this particular
trailer in 2002 f17 they started
production for this trailer to be three
minutes in length it was essentially
there to drive excitement and retention
for the video game for tonight because
it's comprised of six sequences a
hundred and thirty shots and we were
told while the team was told it must be
performant in real-time at 24 frames per
second so that's basically a max render
time of 40 1.6 second six second
milliseconds per per one twenty-fourth
of a second and for those of us who were
coming from film you should remember
that number because that's going to
become the new standard the new 24
frames per second scheduling was
reasonably aggressive
production started around 2000 January
of 2017 and finished in about 20 weeks
this was not including sometime in late
2016 for some development and
pre-production work throughout the
production calendar the team size ranged
anywhere from a small five people all
the way up to about 20 people depending
upon a workload all of the character
performance animation was outsourced to
a company called steamroller studios in
in Florida and I'm not exactly certain
of their of their animation team size
the applications and formats that were
utilized for this well unreal obviously
the game engine but we have Maya for
character animation max for modeling
MOBA for motion builder for motion
capture Premiere Pro for offline and
final editing and then we have some
additional secondary programs substance
designer for materials blender for
destructive simulations shotgun for
production tracking
perforce for version control Olympic and
fbx of course with a file format and of
icon motion systems where the was the
motion capture system so let's get
underway and start talking and
familiarizing ourselves with the five
phases of production most people who are
in creative industries well they're
probably already familiar with this
whether you're in film animation or
games they are development
pre-production production post
production and distribution in I list
this as a traditional linear approach
because these techniques were kind of
developed you know during the Industrial
Revolution and these the manufacturing
industry concepts were applied to film
production and as a result each phase of
these five phases of production
basically produces a product that has to
be completed before it can be passed to
the next stage it's very assembly line
driven and this fit the technology of
the time very beautifully and it allowed
Hollywood to churn out movies at a
really incredible rate you know during
the Golden Age there's some specific
pros and cons with this linear approach
you know it's the pros are it's very
formulaic so therefore it's easy to
establish a certain budgetary model for
films you know it's designed to spread
work incrementally across different
departments and and and work groups and
you know it had basically in the
resource for driving the animation in
film industry during the Golden Age
so the cons of course for this approach
is it's very linear highly
departmentalized that's also a bad thing
it's kind of has an archaic way of
handling the version control of all the
different products that they're
producing and it has a very slow
revision process it's difficult to
schedule and it's just generally slower
but ultimately you know computerization
and the the advent of the visual effects
industry would eventually change all of
this so
today we have a more modern outlook of
the five phases of production it's more
of a nonlinear editing well excuse me
that the nonlinear editing processes and
computer graphics fields and films like
Jurassic Park essentially helped usher
in a more interdependent five phases of
production so very quickly we realized
that the action taken in one phase of
production could dramatically alter the
preparations and execution of another
phase and this was really good and it
was really bad
it's really good because the entire
production team started thinking of the
film as a holistic entity rather than
just you know in an assembly line
approach but it was bad because the
directors started to catch on to this CG
technology and essentially started
asking for whatever the hell they wanted
and the producers of the time are pretty
much happy to go right along with it I'm
sure all of you have heard kind of the
the saying fix it in post correct this
was you know this is practically
Hollywood's mantra and it wasn't until
about you know the late 90s that you
know the whole advent of doing
pre-visualization was used to kind of
help improve the the blueprinting
process during pre-production so it
helps you know reduce costly mistakes
and control expectations of the director
and so forth so this model is still
effective for today but the artistic
demands that we're seeing on technology
keeps increasing and something has to be
done about all of the tighter schedules
and smaller budgets that a lot of visual
effects houses animation studios even
game studios are having to address and
face so this brings me to methodologies
I want to do a comparison basically
against the current model that's I would
call me Oh traditional CG animation and
approaches to how to pull this off
versus a more
next generation version of production
using more real-time technologies and
game engines so there's a couple of
different categories here we have
primary creative tools developmental
model data and production organization
version control and so forth
let's take a look between the two
primary creative tool we have the DCC or
the digital content creation package
like Maya or max that's commonly found
in animation studios today in a next-gen
studio it would be focused around
real-time tools like a game engine the
developmental model again current model
it's a pool based system you know each
department in an animation studio has to
produce a specific product that has to
be finished or close to finish before it
gets passed down to the next department
so the next department can actually
start work in a next-gen system it's
more of a an artist fetch data as needed
make individual changes produce a change
list push it back up into the system and
it disseminates across the entire
workflow data production and
organization current model it's very
decentralized all of your data is stored
on various servers it could be you know
any number of different places and the
production organization is very
departmentalized next-gen studio highly
centralized data organization typically
there's a there's a Depot of data that
is stored where everything is being
transferred to and the production
organization is designed to be more
cooperative version control current
model if you're a small studio it's
typically manual version control with
symbolic linking and if you're a large
studio and you're lucky you've got
scripts and people that can write you
know different ways to handle the
version control systems better in a
next-gen system much more atomic
transactions acid-based transactions for
database handling which makes it much
more durable system and less prone to
problems
work flow current model less parallel
more parallel and finally I'm just going
to talk about the output target in a
current model essentially all of the end
product is working towards producing
images and layers that can be assembled
in a comping process and sent off to
editorial and it's very common in both
animation and visual effects in a
next-gen model it's more about and this
is what epic kind of embraces is a final
pixel output philosophy that's generally
we want to produce as much inside of the
engine as possible and get those final
pixels out from the engine directly to
your audience so whether that's being up
on the silver screen being web
broadcasted or broadcasted on air so
knowing this let's take a look at a
typical animation studio pipeline this
is a modern pipeline nonlinear they have
some very distinct stages that you will
find in which there is a story
department it has a you know that story
department sometimes will work you know
anywhere up from 6 months 12 months to a
year and a half producing story they
produce storyboards that are fed into
editorial which produce a story reel
that story reel is fed into the rough
layout Department meanwhile also running
kind of a little bit in parallel you
have an art department in a production
designer who are basically feeding
concept designs and sketches and such
into the modeling department the rigging
department and surfacing department now
this all kind of happens as various
concepts and designs are approved so we
the end product out of the asset
construction phase along with the story
reel gets fed into the shot-blocking
process of rough layout and final layout
rough layout basically creates the
individual or the entire sequence
comprised of multiple shots and they're
fed basically the story reel as a
reference point and as a complete shots
in rough blocking they replace the
storyboard shots with a 3d blocking
replacement when we get over to
animation and after the sequence is
completed with all of the individual
shots and rough and rough layout
complete it will go over to animation
the animation supervisor then you know
they start producing individual
performance shots for each individual
shot of the sequence and it gets
completed and eventually fed back into
final layout which massages in the
various cameras and so forth and we move
into a shot enhancement portion where we
have stereo and crowds and character
effects and potentially even a mat
Department and ultimately this end
result gets pushed out into the lighting
and rendering pipelines where final
images you know the the scene is lit
it's rendered and its images are spit
out to go into a finalization process
and editing and so forth so this is kind
of generally how it's done today before
I get to to the fortnight animation
pipeline there's some things that you
should understand that the for light the
for tonight project had some specific
advantages number one and the biggest of
course the fortnight video game was
being produced right so all of the game
assets that were within that game IP
could be pulled for use inside of the
fortnight trailer construction so we
hadn't already pre-built models we had
game rigs we had some game animations we
even had constructed scene assemblies
for the different portions inside of the
game and all of this was used to feed
into a pre-visualization process for
fortnight the traditional cg process
well they would have to construct all of
this and you know that could be months
worth of work so we had a huge head
start so let's take a look at the
fortnight pipeline it's quite similar
but yet there are some differences we
didn't have a dedicated story department
but we did create storyboards
storyboards were fed it into editorial
to produce a story real sounds familiar
right
from there our rough layout was
essentially taking those game assets
combining it with motion capture and
doing a technique that in previous we
call first unit previous essentially
that's the director working with
live-action actors inside of a mocap
volume with a camera and he can then
interactively in and to intuitively and
rather fluidly produce shots and block
out the animation with real people it's
a tremendous difference in approach
it's a live-action approach to animation
as opposed to a more traditional
resource where your key framing
everything and you're having to use a
rough layout unit to produce your previs
so to speak all of the data that was
constructed during this rough layout
process was essentially routed into
sequencer where we did a really rough
loose path of creating level sequences
we kept it very loose and freeze so that
you know we could create individual
sequences and shots and so forth it's
actually eventually going to be a
two-part process to this I'll get to
that in a second mom I'll get to it
right now after everything was completed
in our additional one-off shots were
done there was a refining stage or
re-indexing and conforming of all of the
level sequences that were produced
inside of sequencer and we're gonna get
through this all in more detail here
shortly
but during this time things are redo
every index shots are officially created
sub levels are defined and all of this
is being done as sequencer essentially
sequencer becomes the hub of production
whereas in the traditional system
editorial and layout is the hub of
production so step four essentially is
there's an input-output process all of
the data that was created during this
rough layout phase would be would have
to go through it an exporting process
and sent to an ass
that enhancement phase where the game
models may not have been exactly
sufficient for a cinematic trailer so
they have to be appraised and improved
and so forth so they would go through
this there would be additional rigging
steps to improve the rig and textures
were resurfacing was necessary etc and
it would be fed into and into the Maya
pipeline for animation where keyframes
would you know and my key frame
performance would be done you know all
of this then would be routed back out of
Maya and into sequencer again where we
would start the process of final layout
lighting effects simulations post
effects and so forth and output for
rendering now each one of these steps
are gonna go and get a little more
detail in in just a second so what are
the practical differences between these
two approaches well the current
animation pipeline is a very front
loaded story process like I said you
have 18 months to kind of figure out
your story in a next-gen pipeline it's a
very integrated story process a lot of
people found that on fortnight the
director had considerably more control
to make suggestions in the entire
process in a current animation pipeline
shot construction is very deliberate it
is defined very early and upfront with
the storyboarding process which is again
fed into rough layout and by that time
you know what your shots are period the
next-gen pipeline for fortnight it was
much more of a like a live action shot
construction process like I was
mentioning the director actually could
on the day make decisions I mentioned
this already editorial and layout is the
production hub of the current system in
the next-gen system it's all about
sequencer and then after in the current
system after things are done in layout
well it becomes a very team governed
system by the animation supervisors the
head of layout you know all of these
extra creatives are are essentially
taking over the director starts to lose
his creative influence while in a
next-gen pipeline again the director has
it's much more director centric and he's
capable of making changes throughout the
process we'll talk about revision and
revision systems in a couple of extra
slides so story development we're now
going to get into the specifics there
were storyboards that were drawn up for
fortnight they were used for initial
ideas and there were multiple concepts
that were considered for this all the
storyboards were essentially scanned and
put into Premiere Pro and there was a
temp a cut made and a story reel made
that was essentially used as reference
for the mocap shoot this is not too far
too different from the traditional
approach of creating a an animatic or a
bordo Matic so next step we're into this
this mocap and previz session that we're
having that we are calling rough layout
not in the traditional sense but
essentially what we have here is we have
a vikon motion builder solution that was
being used the the action was examined
for logical breaks in the action the
progression and the location of where
the animation was going to occur with
inside of the scene assembly so the idea
was this let's record as much motion
capture as we can in large single takes
as possible and then we would review it
and import it into the engine and
validated to make sure that everything
was playing back fine and everything was
good
during this time we're starting to
basically block out what we thought were
you know what was best for the rough
levels sequence definition throughout
this process again very loose and free
at this particular moment and all of
these takes and shots were assembled in
one large fat master level sequence from
there basically there may have been
additional changes additional changes in
the script or voiceovers if that was the
case there would be a one-off sessions
with the director to capture those
particular shots and those were also
added into this master level sequence
and once that was complete that sequence
was divided up accordingly into what
would be defined as shots and all the
excess and deleted are all the excess
footage in these duplicated level
sequences was deleted so that it would
be just the individual shot cameras
could were added in ordered with inside
of the duplicated level sequences in
order to help basically frame and a
chain you know obtain your screen
direction and so forth and by the time
the individual shots were completed in
this rough phase all the unnecessary
actors and set pieces and such were
basically removed from the cameras field
of view that wasn't necessary in order
to kind of like keep things simple so
this process once it was complete
required a time of conforming all of
this inside of sequencer so it's at this
stage that loose definition that we made
well it's time to start getting serious
so all the rough level sequences that we
made were organized into a more
traditional sequence beat shot show
structure that's commonly found in film
the level sequences were completely
rebuilt to support this new
configuration and officials shot numbers
were assigned to the and re-indexed and
assigned with with inside of sequencer
and also in put it into shotgun for
production tracking it was at this point
that the fortnight was branched off from
fortnight main so we still were attached
to the actual game and it was at this
point that we knew that it was time to
create a separate fork in the road so
that we wouldn't wind up making any
destructive changes to what was
happening on the game front so with that
let me just show you quickly just so you
can see here the this is basically we're
inside of sequencer here and these are
the six individual sequences that were
created there is the opening sequences
the DB sequence and on through each each
one of these sequences when you enter
inside you can see that there is a
nested let me see your there we go
these are the individual level sequences
that make up the individual shots and if
you go inside of each individual shot
you can see that there is a number of
folders that contain the specific
characters and the scene assemblies and
cameras and Lighting's for that single
shot let's see you're also go back over
here all right so we have all this data
it's now inside of the engine and we
have to start thinking about animation
process so we have to get data out of
the engine and into the Maya pipeline
because our animators are going to be
working entirely inside of Maya so for
the various scene assemblies and
environments and even though the
character's game asset characters and
their motion capture was all exported
out unfortunately
manually because at the time we did not
have any specific tools that were
designed to do this process for us and
these scene assemblies
were brought into Maya so that the
animators could have a reference for
their performance restaging shots with
additional rough layout usually was not
required unless it was absolutely
necessary our our goal was to take what
was specifically blocked out in our
first unit previous or rough layout
stage and and go from there so just a
word quickly about version control epic
of course uses perforce with a
customized rapper that is known as
unreal game sync it's unreal games
basically helps us track change lists
and timestamps all of the specific
information and detail about each
individual change that's being up so
this is how this process was utilized on
on the film or excuse me the trailer and
I also want to talk briefly about batch
IO again I talked that this process at
this time was highly manual it's all we
had so we could do scripted batching and
exporting out of Maya with Python that
was easiest but everything else in
unreal engine we had to do manually and
this was a major pain point and I want
to make note that Python is coming to
unreal and is expected at least last I
was told in 419 so for visual effects
houses and for animation studios this is
a big major yes so next thing I want to
talk about is sub level organization so
inside of unreal they the CG supervisor
the director they wanted to make sure
that everybody could possibly work on
this show in a parallel fashion so they
created a series of sub levels in order
to organize the labor by specific
discipline and and ultimately to control
see an assembly visibility and you know
character visibility and a number of
other factors so we have some specific
sub levels that are created of course we
have a persistent level which is the
virtual scene
container of all the sublevels and
inside of that there is environmental
sub levels for the various scene
assemblies I'll show you some of those
in just a second there's a character
sublevel where all the FBX bodies for
the characters would reside and we'll
get to that
there were sub levels for the various
sequences or the sinha sequences for
each beat there was lighting sub levels
blueprint sub levels and a
post-processing sub level for doing
post-processing effects after the fact
let's see here if we go
so just to show you here the sublevels
were designed you know to have specific
visibility cues that would be override
on an individual you know set up for
each individual sequence and potentially
changed inside of each individual shot
so for this particular case you can see
some of the properties and which levels
are visible and which ones are not
depending upon where you are inside of
the if sequencer so here we have
specific visible sub levels DB cine DB
lighting this is you know specific for
the DB sequence lighting exterior etc so
this process was essentially a way to
help organize control visibility and
allow a more specific means to work in
parallel alright okay so while we're
preparing for our for the animators to
have a reference for blocking there's
also a stage that's happening in
parallel in which we're enhancing all of
the game assets so the the fortnight
characters the game assets worth good
some of them were usable with inside of
the trailer most were not several or not
and the idea was is that they had to be
enhanced so these game asset characters
were brought over and they were brought
in to max and all of the heads and
bodies were separated the models and
textures were then augmented with
additional resolution and extra topology
were needed any of the baked lighting
was then stripped out of the assets
texture maps because as you've heard in
the last presentation fortnight used a
dynamic lighting setup so there was
going to be no baked lighting and we'll
explain why and just
and all the facial geometries
implemented a universalized
topology so that we could exchange data
between characters and have shared
expressions and so forth the character
rigging all the game rigs they too had
to be enhanced
so characters inside of Maya now were
rerigged with the art version 2.0 tools
inside of Maya additional leaf nodes
were added for anammox you know good way
to supply secondary animation for free
and the entire facial rake was rebuilt
with new controllers and additional
joints in order to approve facial
appearance so let's talk briefly about
this whole FBX and olympic cash workflow
the body for each individual character
would be in FBX and each body for each
hero character which was our four
primary four Denari characters the
mother and the child had an average of
about 55,000 polygons or 110,000
triangles each Olympic head was an
average 35,000 polygons to 70,000
triangles again a universalized topology
and so each character would basically
add up to approximately a hundred and
eighty-five thousand triangles per hero
character so if we were to look at this
you have the individual FBX body and the
head so it's kind of funny a lot of
times for a number of the scenes you see
a lot of people walking around without
heads but in the breakdown for each
individual shot the bodies of the
characters would be referenced into the
shot while the heads the olympic caches
were spawned on an individual shot basis
all right
that's fear okay so let's take a look at
the original game rake here is our
lovely soldier here this is this twenty
six facial joint game rake it looks
pretty good you know you get some decent
expressions however the face and the
structure looks harder sharper and
there's a specific limitation with FB
X's implementation and unreal you can
only have eight influences per vertex
using FBX and Unreal so this gave us
some limited deformation capability the
improved cinematic facial rig and
improved topology on the faces up the
number of joints to 201 joints for the
the facial rig and this rig was combined
or it was a combination of joints blend
shapes and lattices and you know
basically taking advantage of all of the
of the animation and deformation
capabilities inside of Maya and
ultimately this deforming mesh you know
it removes that whole influence
limitation with FBX so this Olympic cash
for each head for each shot would be
exported and converted to GPU morphs
inside of Unreal Engine and blended and
streamed out of memory in real time so
here's an example what that looks like
you can see it's it's much more fluid
it's much more expressive the face looks
softer and you know very expressive and
inside of Maya all performance animation
was outsourced to steamroller studios in
Eustis Florida steamroller or they
utilize their own asset and production
management pipeline to produce and track
all the data as steamroller completed
the individual animation for H shot it
would be uploaded to box where it was
downloaded by the epic animation team
and tweaked were necessary and then
integrated into unreal all Maya files at
epic were then tracked through perforce
to ensure version control this was
tricky because you've had an FBX body
you had an Olympic head and he had
various props that the characters were
carrying all facial performance was
keyframed and exported as an Olympic
cash body performances again utilize a
combination of game assets mocap and key
framing exported as FBX prop animation
was keyframed and exported as FBX and
all destructive simulations were
actually done in blender and exported as
an Olympic cash material matching for
Olympic just a touch on that the
materials would need to match between
Maya and what would be in unreal and you
would assign your textures and materials
to the actual faces of the geometry not
just the overall mesh and then the all
characters inside of Maya was primarily
using quads so it had to be triangulated
into a mesh and exported out as an
Olympic cache where the ABC file was
then imported as a skeletal mesh inside
of unreal and again converted to PC a
compressed morph targets and I was told
make sure to tell them use GPU for morph
targets needs to be turned on when
you're importing this so I want to note
that there isn't a a YouTube stream that
was just released on the 21st by tim
Hobson and Sam dieter which gives you an
excellent overview of the Olympic
pipeline on a step-by-step basis it's a
great demo so take a look for that
online and you can learn more about this
process all right out of animation we're
now back in the engine and we are doing
final layout and scene polishing so
we've got two you know they're usually
was no need for additional restaging of
shots unless it was absolutely necessary
and if it was that animation changes
could be done inside of Maya then
brought back into the engine all camera
animation constructed inside of Unreal
Engine and let's see here I've already
mentioned that character animation
performances would if it was required to
be changed would return to Maya make the
changes and been brought back into
Unreal lighting briefly on this there
was a system of light rates that were
used for some sequences and other
sequences used spawnable lights
generally the team found that light rigs
was the preferred methodology however
spawnable lights worked as well both
were for performant lighting priorities
were utilized to alter the light
planning on an individual shot basis so
you could have a light plan for the
overall sequence and then when you got
into the individual shots you could
override that light plan and make
changes specifically for the shot
the choice of lighting was dynamic
lighting overbaked lighting
mainly for the benefit of the director
when you're trying to do creative
control and you're trying to you know
make things look good a baked lighting
though when optimized probably gave
better performance it was just taking
too long to make the changes that the
director and cinematographer may well
may have wanted and so they chose to go
with dynamic lighting instead a distant
field ambient occlusion was connected to
the various base materials of of objects
in the scene providing a soft shadowing
effect for anything in the scene that
was being hit with non shadow producing
lights and then they also utilized P CSS
soft shadows on dynamic lights and spots
you know to give a nice soft shadow
appearance with the lowest overhead
possible
Effects and post-processing this is a I
want to point out if you did not get the
chance to see the SIGGRAPH live
presentation online please check it out
because Ryan Brooks gave an extremely
much more detailed description of this
entire process but essentially real-time
Navia strokes for the fluid simulations
were used to do all the 3d volumetric
storm clouds and fog and and I'm just
going to leave it at that I would highly
suggest that you take a look at the
YouTube presentation it goes over all of
the the the processes of creating the
the fog and the the the deaths of the
husks and how they they would appear
once they were struck by you know
bullets or whatever so let's see I also
want to mention that I stated that there
was a post-processing sublevel that
would also allow you to implement the
tone mapper capabilities inside of
unreal and they use this to do color
correction with inside of the sequences
and shots as necessary and this is kind
of interesting because this whole
process lets you control with the tone
mapper the entire look and feel of you
know the general appearance of your
final outputted pixels so the guys at
the at the team here they went and
created an interesting little extra well
this day and sequencer here excuse me it
will go in engine and let's see actually
sorry escape I want to also do this
it did an interesting little variation
of the fortnight trailer to do kind of a
film noir look so we go for Lac on the
white have a little vignette and do some
work on the audio and even cooler put
infant theorem all right people let's
search this dump
and get out of here ASAP garbage rats
I'm also gonna customize
[Music]
[Applause]
did you do that you've got nothing to
worry we've got his boy transform long
I've got the hiker in a white papers so
I want to point this out just that you
know using post-processing effects you
can make immediate changes to your
project especially if you're going live
to customize your your final output on
an as-needed basis which is I think
pretty cool so I know I'm running out of
time all right
so final output all the shots were
rendered out of sequencer as image
sequences those image sequences were
brought into Premiere Pro for for final
editing that the conforming process
between editorial and sequencer is still
something that is leaves much to be
desired
unreal does have support for EDL's but
this process was definitely a manual
conforming process to make sure that
there was parity between what was being
seen in editorial versus what was
currently inside of sequencer but
there's a lot of discussions right now
and part of my interaction with
animation visual effects houses is to
improve this process so okay that
basically wraps up the the pipeline and
I guess if we have questions we can go
from there
yes yes
Hey to what extent was sound design
implemented in the production process on
the trailer using sequencer it's my
understanding that most of like in a
traditional process there was a
recording process of the characters you
know voiceovers I believe most of the
sound design was handled through the
more of a traditional editorial process
than in within with sequencer but all
the tracks were recorded and inserted
into sequencer to help with performance
blocking and you know timing purposes
I'd have to get you more information for
that but good question thanks yep
questions over here I have another audio
question oh great audio engine will be
kind of actually out and can be used in
sequencer or like more in-game besides
like using so what specifically is your
question
I guess when the audio engine will come
[Music]
I can't give you an answer for that one
I am unaware I will check with my tech
guys though and see if I can get you an
answer after the show yes I was just
wondering did you have an actual so you
mentioned about look that were added was
actually sequencer used to completely
control the color grading process of the
entire trailer or was there like a more
classical past like you did with a pole
for example the desire was to keep
everything within the engine and
utilized the tone map
our capabilities in the engine to make
modifications and changes to any type of
color for on a shot by shot basis so it
was purely a tone mapper that was used
systematic than a shot by shot basis
that's my understanding
thank you question in the back
Hey haha that was a great talk very
inspiring I founded a studio basically a
couple years ago on the idea that the
future of animation was gonna be
real-time super great to see this
process reflected in the adjustment of
the pipeline I'm wondering if you guys I
know this is for night but if you guys
have thought about or have done any
experiments in unreal with AR kit or a
arc or and how you see the pipeline
changing or this the idea of this
pipeline changing with augmented reality
and virtual reality Wow definitely as
part of the Enterprise team it's kind of
our goal to handle all non-game
interactions with our clients so AR kid
AR core augmented reality huge big thing
I was just looking at some today in one
of our meetings in which I was be able
to you know look at different pieces of
furniture inside of an iPad and you've
seen some of the other examples I would
say for the future of this definitely
the idea of being able to utilize
augmented reality as a storytelling
device is it's intriguing it's different
it's I would say what would be accepted
or expected within the next you know
three to five years especially as the
technology continues to get better and
we get you know decent glasses that you
know can make this lightweight and
portable and simpler to use but yes I
would say you will definitely see the
story process embrace that medium
another question here
so if I understand correctly you had a
process where you exported everything
that was in sequencer to Lamia and you
did editorial refinement I'm not
entirely sure I understand why that was
required and the corollary question is
how does sequencer deal with actually
generating media that is suitable for an
editorial package
in other words fully unique ID time
stamped correctly with timecode frame
rate management all of that stuff all of
that is definitely something that has to
be addressed there's again at this
particular stage it was all about just
simply outputting you know image
sequence files outside of out of
sequence or out of unreal and imported
into Premiere Pro the whole relationship
between you know conforming between
Premiere Pro and with sequencer was at
this stage manual at best that's
definitely something that I've heard
from a number of different clients
requesting that kind of functionality to
be able to have a level of parody
between sequencer and an external
editorial package you know trust me
that's something that we're we know
about and are planning to address so to
answer your other question the idea of
still allowing an actual film editor to
have his hands and his eyeballs on the
content is still of great value so you
know until we get editors who are fully
proficient inside of using unreal and
using sequencer for doing editing that
may be a little bit difficult so the
whole idea here was to provide the
footage to the to editorial in order to
have them work their magic so to speak
so it is more a question of skills as
opposed to
a question of functionality well it's a
bit of both actually so you know you've
got to have editors who are familiar
with this kind of technology and you
know being able to put this all together
plus you know we're clearly missing some
key tool sets to allow parity between
the two thank you you know to point on
that it would be really great you know
even in the earlier stages when you're
doing storyboarding and creating a story
reel that ultimately will be brought in
and followed as a guideline
you know much in the same way of a
traditional pipeline it'd be nice to
have something in reference where if the
editor makes changes even as early as
the story reel that it would update
sequencer and likewise if you made
changes in sequencer it would inform
editorial that's hugely crucial