Apr 4, 2017

Behind the Scenes of "Mr. Carton": Animated Series Made with a Game Engine

It is no secret that producing good computer animation is time-consuming and expensive. But what if there was a way to reduce production time without sacrificing quality?

French animator Michaël Bolufer is attempting to do just that by employing the Unity game engine to complete a series of 13 2-minute shorts called "Mr. Carton. The entire series can be viewed in Studio 4 at France Televisions. The story of [Mr. Carton] is about a clumsy driver who drives a car made of cardboard to a lighthouse at the top of a mountain. Cartoon Brew spoke with Boruffer about the decision behind the game engine (i.e., real-time rendering) approach in the show, the challenges he and his team faced along the way, and where this technology will be used in animation in the future.

Prior to creating "Mr. Carton," Boruffer worked in both the video game and animation industries. During that time, he was able to experiment with the tools available. With the usual offline production toolset for animation, Boruffer told Cartoon Brew that he spent his time "scratching my nose, playing guitar, drawing something on paper under the keyboard, going to cafes, and waiting for the renderings to finish."

But with the game, he found that he wasted no time in composing the final image because of the real-time game engine used. The results were instantaneous and could be re-rendered almost instantly if creative decisions changed.

The idea of using Unity in the first place came after Boruffer actually developed teasers in 2012 using other 3D tools. These proved to be time-consuming, so he turned instead to the toolset used at the time for racing games at Atefacts Studios in France. That was Unity.

A team of storyboard artists, modelers, animators, writers, and compositors is still needed to produce the episodes. Although the cars and world appear to be cardboard, they are actually 3D models that utilize photo textures. Finally, "Mr. Carton" uses a combination of tools, including Blender, 3ds Max, and Unity for 3D modeling, rigging, and animation; Adobe Premiere Pro for editing; and Photoshop for 2D work.

But without Unity in the pipeline, Boruffer believes that a more traditional approach would have slowed production. 'We spent more or less 21 days per episode,' he says. If we had used the classic CG pipeline, it would have taken another 20 percent longer. [Boruffer said he spent a lot of time learning the software, "making test scenes, making little games for my two daughters, testing assets in the asset store," before going into actual production. I needed to have a global perspective on this tool. We had to make sure we weren't on a little cardboard Titanic."

"But," Boruffer added, "it's not just a job. 'It's a daily job, and there are always new things to explore, new ways to use old things.' The most important thing was to have a story to tell and characters to play with."

The main difference between the game engine pipeline with Unity and the more traditional offline workflow was the sequencing phase, which was required to bring together animation, models, camera, lighting, and compositing.

For this, the team used a Unity extension called Flux. Bolufer noted in an interview for the Unity blog post, "The sequencer is where the big boosts happen in the real-time animation production pipeline, both time-wise and creatively."

Bolufer states that there were "no limitations" in using Unity compared to using a non-real-time approach. This suggests that real-time game engines will be used in other short and feature films.

"As long as you have game industry and animation leads in each major department and a well-structured team, there is nothing more difficult than making a game," says Boruffer.

"You don't have players watching in all directions trying to hide behind a rock.

The series has now been released in France for a little over a month (online, it is geolocked in that country, but two episodes are available from anywhere). Plans are in the works to release the series abroad, and Bolfer hopes to produce a second season and a game as well. The idea of a game is a key reason we used Unity," he said. We already have a fun little prototype of the original car game with Mr. Carton, but we need to find funding for this part of the project.