Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/552848
j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 5 c g w 4 1 or years now, the industry has been waiting for the day when the great divide between film and game creation ceases to exist. Unquestionably, the two worlds have been inching closer and closer during the past decade. Game artists and feature-film animators/VFX artists have crossed the void to work on projects "on the other side." Many of the same tools are being used, as are many of the same techniques. As close as the industry has come, true convergence has not occurred – until now. Just recently, a group at Epic Games, led by CTO Kim Libreri, merged these two worlds with the stunning digital short film "A Boy and His Kite." The produc- tion is epic in scale, spanning 100 square miles of terrain, and the environments are breath- taking, filled with photorealistic flora and fauna. The scenery transitions from a nice, easy landscape to one that is much harder to negotiate. There are meadows, a river valley, a forest, a lake, a valley ridge, and a cave. And the main character, a pre-teen boy, looks as if he stepped out of a high-end feature film. The two-minute film – which debuted at the Game Develop- ers Conference this past spring – follows the young boy as he chases his beloved kite aer it breaks free from its tether. Dashing over the picturesque landscape, he attempts to retrieve his possession, finally catching up to it at the mouth of a mysterious cave high up in the mountains. The story also describes the struggle to unite the game and film worlds, as technologists and artists have long pursued tools and techniques that would finally unite and even merge the genres. Yet, the film is so very much more than a great story and its underlying message. Aesthet- ically, the imagery looks as if it was generated on high-end machines running the latest content creation soware and employing state-of-the-art techniques. And in truth, it was. However, at the heart of the process is Epic's Unreal Engine 4. And those techniques? Well, they were fine-tuned and opti- mized for the game engine. Oh, and one more thing: The digital short is presented in real time, running at 30 frames per sec- ond (fps) on Unreal Engine 4. N E W D I R E C T I O N S "A Boy and His Kite" began as a project to showcase the capa- bilities of the new Unreal Engine 4.8, but resulted in a touching, beautiful digital short in its own right. Indeed, Epic is well known for creating trailers that show off the latest features and capa- bilities within its newly released version of Unreal Engine. Mostly these have consisted of sci-fi, first-person shooter imagery – explosions and mass de- struction – within feature-rich environments. Not this time. "We have done dark, mon- ster-y cinematic demos in the past, which were not so much stories as they were showcases of new features or technical improvements in the engine. This time we wanted something different. The engine is capable of so much more than dark sur- faces, explosions, and gunshots. It's very much a blank canvas for people to paint on. You can do anything you can think of within it," says Gavin Moran, director of the short as well as an animator and storyboard artist at Epic. "Kim's idea was to make a short film that looks like a CG short and would blow people away (albeit in a different sense). He wanted it to star a human, and we were not going to hide anything. We were going to push the engine as far as we could." One of the improvements to the new Unreal Engine is its abil- ity to visualize large-scale envi- ronments. But how do you avoid becoming overwhelmed with the challenge of creating 100 square miles of open, outdoor terrain as well as the tools – technology that everyone can understand and that will bring the desired results out on the other side? Insofar as the extensive terrain was concerned, the group knew it wanted an outdoor environ- ment reminiscent of Scotland. "And, we wanted to do some- thing beautiful for beauty's sake," says Libreri, "and something emotional that would resonate with people in general. And do it with an engine anyone can use. We planned a large set with lots of fauna and flora, lots of animated characters appearing on screen at the same time. We wanted to show the vastness and the flowers and trees that were procedurally generated – assets that are beautiful." The objective was twofold: to entertain and to showcase the engine and its capabilities. Well, threefold actually. "We wanted to inspire people as creators to tell a story with this new technol- ogy, as opposed to the laborious, classic process of film produc- tion in which you are unable to see things evolve right in front of your eyes," Libreri says. "It is quite a liberating process [using the game engine]. I thought, let's show the classic media industry what they can do with real-time technology today." The digital short was created in less than nine weeks, from concept to completion – an amazing feat with a crew of approximately 15 people. Of course, this did not include the team working on the new game engine technology. I N S I D E T H E W O R L D As Libreri points out, features such as dynamic lighting that can vary according to time of day and a large-scale moun- tainous terrain with varied, realistic foliage is very difficult to do in-engine, but new systems within Unreal Engine 4 make those tasks easier to achieve. " WE WANTED TO DO SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL FOR BEAUTY'S SAKE AND SOMETHING EMOTIONAL THAT WOULD RESONATE WITH PEOPLE IN GENERAL. AND DO IT WITH AN ENGINE ANYONE CAN USE."