Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/30784
n n n n Animation each arena has a different resolution require- ment, as do the various screens to which the operator would be porting the imagery. “So going down a regular render pipe was not an option for us,” says Rausch. “If we had to modify assets and re-render assets through a normal type of prerender pipeline, the required time and budget would have gone through the roof.” Alternatively, the group decided to use Epic Games’ Unreal game engine for render- ing—a big step in a very unusual direction for HOM, Rausch admits. Under typical circumstances and as they have done for years, the crew would have cho- sen a non-real-time renderer. And while the rections so quickly. “When the opportunity [for the All-Star Game] presented itself to the client, we were able to move forward quickly and aggressively,” he says. “[The All-Star Game project] was something the client didn’t want to pass up.” During the NHL All-Star Game in Raleigh, North Carolina, the short played in the sta- dium, on both the Versus and CBC Networks, and online. The film introduced the new superheroes as they joined forces to battle vil- lain Deven Dark as he tried to take over the RBC Center—that is, until the Carolina Hur- ricane saves the day in an ultimate power play. In order to ready the short, HOM had to character into its own city—for instance, the Philadelphia Flyer as he glides around City Hall and zooms off to the Wells Fargo Center. This work honed in on the individual char- acters, such as intricate wing movements, as these Guardians fight crime in their own city. “Our work evolved from straight-forward, easy, one-off moves, to trying to tell a story with more complex combinations of moves in the longer, open piece,” says HOM’s Peter Krygowski, who directed the project. According to Krygowski, when the All-Star work was requested, he began to build a story around the individual power moves he had al- ready mocapped, “and that covered about 60 crew did not use the real-time capability of Unreal due to the heaviness of the scenes, the engine was able to handle the character passes very quickly. “We didn’t need it to handle 30 or 60 frames per second, like most people who use it do. We just needed it to be faster than other pre-render engines,” says Rausch. “Be- cause it was so fast, we could render at whatev- er resolution we wanted, and then adjust our cameras and re-render the pass with a different size plate.” Freezing the Puck With this “agile” production pipeline in place, HOM began a breakaway, making speedy progress on the project. Then, the crew hit soft ice. “GME said, ‘Everything you’re working on, we need you to push off. We now need a two-minute piece for the All-Star Game in January,’” recalls Rausch. That two-minute piece—a coming out of sorts for the Guardians—turned into 3.5 min- utes of animation in a short that included all 30 characters as well as a villain. “We had to design it, comp it, animate it, light it, add ef- fects, and so on,” says Rausch. “It was an ag- gressive production.” Rausch credits the group’s earlier decision to incorporate the nonlinear building-block approach with HOM’s ability to change di- 28 April 2011 HOM inserted the Guardians into a live-action plate (augmented with CGI) for an animated short film the crew created for the NHL All-Star Game, where the superheroes made their formal debut. temporarily stop the original work mid-ice. Assets for only two Guardians—the Phila- delphia Flyer and the LA King—were in use at that point, so HOM drafted partners to help create the remaining assets that would be needed. Subsequently, most of the All-Star presentation used 3D character models crafted by Massive Black. Men in Motion The CG assets were built using Autodesk’s Maya and Pixologic’s ZBrush, while Auto- desk’s MotionBuilder was used to retarget the motion. The motion capture for the All-Star presentation was done over a nine-day period, achieved using 80 Vicon T160 cameras set up within a 70x40-foot capture volume. In all, it took the crew a little over two and a half months to complete the work for the short, while work on the initial rollout continued following the delay. In all, HOM will have completed 250 dif- ferent deliverables for The Guardian Project. The initial mocap sessions entailed capturing the characters’ power moves based on their particular strengths. The subsequent anima- tions, which are more discreet moves, were for 30-second one-offs needed to introduce each percent of what I needed,” he says. “The story line [of the heroes getting sucked into the building], though, demanded that we create some unique animations and blend stuff we had already shot. That’s not easy to do, because gravity works against you. So if we didn’t have the mocap data, we used the base of the data and converted it into hand-keyed movement.” In some instances, the animation was 100 per- cent hand-keyed in Maya and then fed into the Unreal Engine. Some of the characters in the short even have facial animation, which was done using blendshapes. Work is still progressing on this front; the team is also refining all the charac- ter rigs to make them more robust and better tuned for the Unreal pipeline. As Krygowski points out, the characters initially were de- signed and rigged to exist by themselves in their own worlds. But when that changed for the short, the rigs had to be temporarily tweaked so the Guardians could co-exist in the same screen. The environments for The Guardian Proj- ect, meanwhile, were all created in-house at HOM. For the All-Star Game, though, the crew decided to incorporate a live-action plate due to the time limitation. The group got an