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GAMES ENGINES FEATURE
Director Neill Blomkamp’s Oats Studios is pushing the boundaries of filmmaking and changing the role of game engines QUESTIONS JULIAN MITCHELL IMAGES OATS STUDIOS
Def: Where is the time saving? Surely this is very computer intensive to the point that a full movie would take years to produce? CH: Interesting question. There are lots of time- saving ramifications due to using a real-time engine like Unity. Generally speaking, the ‘asset’ creation portion, or pre-production if you will, is essentially unchanged from a duration perspective. Rather it’s in three other areas I would say where the biggest impact lies: shot production, creative exploration, and subsequent reuse or sequels. I’ll give you an example for each: • Shot production Let’s use lighting artists as an example. In a traditional workflow using an offline renderer, if a lighting artist wants to make a change (adjust lights, etc.) they need to do single frame test renders. These could take up to an hour for a single frame. People employ tricks like turning down the quality settings to get faster approximate results but it takes a long time to make an adjustment and then evaluate it; and that might just be for a single frame spot check. If you want to watch the whole shot it might take overnight or even a few days to get it back at full quality, using up to hundreds of computers to render. And if you’re making a sequence wide adjustment, that’s days away. For our artists, working in real time means they literally can move the lights around and see the results in full quality as they move them. Just like you grabbing your desk light and moving it around, you instantly see the results. That single artist can just hit play and see sequence wide changes in the time it takes to play watch the sequence.
Definition: Please explain the basic premise of this kind of production. Is this a mixture of digital capture, motion capture and then extensive post-production using the acceleration of a game engine? Chris Harvey, VFX Supervisor, Oats Studios: I guess at its most basic, this is simply an all CG animated short film. But of course it’s more complex than that. The crux of it was that it was done in Unity and done in such a way as to not just take advantage of a ‘game engine’, but to look past that and see Unity more as a real-time creation engine. For us that means that our film essentially is ‘live’ all the time throughout the entire process and beyond. It doesn’t need to be flattened down into a QuickTime. If you had the project loaded you could at any time simply hit play and watch the film, at whatever state it was in and with whatever modifications you had made. Then beyond that you could look at how we got there, what ingredients went into making this real-time short film. From that perspective we used a lot of different techniques; we did traditional location scouting and then digitised that world (via photogrammetry) and loaded it into Unity. We did motion capture for the body performance and performance capture for the faces, essentially grabbing the actor’s true face at 60 frames-per- second as true geometry and using that in the film. We had a traditional costume designer to fabricate the costumes, which we then mimicked and recreated in the computer. On top of that we had all the typical crafts of very talented CG artists from modelling, texturing, lighting, rigging, animation, FX and so on.
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MARCH 2018 DEFINITION
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