Jul 17, 2018

How E.d.Films uses real time in animated film production

We hear a lot these days about how game engines, aka real-time rendering, can be a part of animation production, especially for small studios with limited resources. However, this is still a relatively new aspect of production, and animation pipelines are being developed and tailored to incorporate game engines.

A studio called e.d. films in Montreal, Canada, has embraced real-time in a big way, making its own game engine media export tool called Scene Track available for free download. e.d.'s short film "Giant Bear." hand-crafted with a 2D touch, but produced with the help of 3D and real-time tools, is the result of this studio's experimentation with new filmmaking techniques.

Cartoon Brew asked Emily Page, president and creative producer, to talk about such an approach to e.d.films' work, how Scene Track was born, and how real-time and other technologies have allowed the studio to create films that retain the feel of hand-drawn animation. We asked him about this approach to e.d.films, how Scene Track came about, and how real-time and other technologies are changing the way films are made while still retaining the feel of hand-drawn animation.

Page described e.d. films as an animation studio and digital tools lab. Founded by Page with art and tech director Daniel Giese, e.d. films has been based in Montreal since 2007 and continues to produce a variety of short animated content, starting with short educational and cultural projects and how-to videos. In particular, e.d.films has always been technically inclined, sharing and selling animation supplies such as brushes, rigs, props, and animated motion graphics such as snowfall templates for others to use.

Regarding the use of game engines, Page says that as a small studio with a limited budget, the goal was to produce world-class animated content in a limited amount of time and resources. Anyone familiar with animation knows how expensive and labor-intensive the process can be," Page said. Unlike live action, where a director can experiment with different things on the set and then build the piece in the editing room, once the animation production is set in motion, there is little room for experimentation."

So e.d. turned to real time. However, they soon realized that none of the available game engines had "record and export" capabilities, making it difficult to get game engine data into the studio's existing pipeline. The solution was to build their own exporter, which became Scene Track. We created Scene Track so that we could generate data that we could convert to whatever format we wanted," said Mr. Krishnamoorthy. For now, we decided to focus on FBX, MIDI, video, and image sequences."

SceneTrack was created to work with Unity, which e.d.films was using. However, the studio's plan is to eventually make the tool platform-agnostic. It will record gameplay of animated characters and assets, which can then be dragged into the animation timeline and used in scenes. Says Page. 'This allows us to get animation into the set quickly. Once you're done with playback, recording, timing, etc., you can import everything you've created in Unity into your CG animation package and polish it up for the finished shot."

Page says that e.d. Films uses Maya's HumanIK (HIK) rigging and motion capture workflow to rig its humanoid characters and then applies Unity animation on top of that, which is a huge time saver He says it's been a great time saver." From a character without a rig to an asset animated in Unity, he can go back to Maya and polish the animation in less than an hour."

Scene Track was recently used in e.d. films' short film "Giant Bear." This is an animated film that has been in the works for several years and tells the story of the Inuit legend of the last monster bear and an Inuit hunter. Giant Bear uses 2D environments and 3D character models, and the final look has an illustrative, painterly feel to it, with constant movement in the images. According to Page, they also considered several Unity-related tools in the making of the film.

"What we wanted more than anything was organic, natural movement, and we wanted to apply that to the final Maya cinematic rig," says Page. One of the first things we did was have the hunters walk and run across a long, rough stretch of land." The Unity Asset Store has some really cool Unity plug-ins for automating complex animations and behaviors on character rigs in real time. We just traced the surface. We only traced the surface, but with Final IK and OOTI's character controllers for Unity, we were able to make the basic walk cycle react to the terrain in a matter of minutes. His feet were facing the ground, his body was leaning against the hill, and I could use the mouse to direct his gaze as he stomped through the snow."

With these tools, e.d. films began to treat the scenes almost like live action, experimenting with variations. They introduced obstacles, changed the direction of the hunter, made him stop and look, get lost, and changed the terrain in real time. At one point, we even had the hunter running on standing ice or jumping off the ground. Once we'd captured the animation we wanted, we'd bring it back into Maya, discard the character's geometry, and put it back into the cinematic rig. We tweaked and refined the animation and rendered everything using Arnold."

The effects done in post helped achieve the painterly look as well as slow down the frame rate of the character's movements. Says Page, "So a subtle action with a bit of movement would get about four frames per second, while a fast movement would only get 12 to 18 frames per second." Ultimately, this means the character's frame rate is constantly changing. This is a rare process in 3D, but it is becoming more common. It was done in The Peanuts Movie, and it will be used a lot in the upcoming animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse."

"Giant Bear" is nearing completion. The 10-minute short was co-produced with Iqaluit-based Taqqut Productions and funded by the Nunavut Film Development Corporation and the National Film Production Board of Canada; E.d. Films is currently looking for distribution partners.