Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/552848
48 cgw j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 5 R E V O L U T I O N I N F I L M M A K I N G Many artists have crossed the bridge from feature films to games, including Libreri and Moran, who previously worked at Escape/ILM and Dream- Works/Imageworks, respective- ly. For "A Boy and His Kite," they used their collective skill sets to tell a story, albeit with a unique set of tools and in a unique way. Want to change the boy's hair color? No problem, it can be done instantly, and the results can be seen instantly. "There is no renderfarm involved," Libreri points out. All you need is a good computer to play the demo and fly around and modify the imagery. Want to see a different angle? Just alter the focal lens, camera, and so forth. "Imagine a world in the fu- ture, where you are watching an animated movie and it can be different every single time you watch it," Libreri adds. "You can buy clothing, and the audience can change the outfits based on their own personal tastes. The system is living and breathing." Libreri points out that the vi- sual fidelity achieved with Unreal Engine is probably the highest available with video gaming tech- nology today. And while there were still some artifacts in "A Boy and His Kite" that would not be present in an animated movie, they are minor – so minor, in fact, that most people don't realize that it is "playing" in real time. "It's not just an animated short made in Unreal Engine. It's an animated short that runs live at 30 fps," says Libreri. "The dif- ference is, while you are playing the cinematic, you can pause it at any time and fly around the environment. We can adjust the time of day. We can fly through the clouds and down into the forest. We essentially built the cinematic in a virtual world." It's Libreri's belief that once people realize the creative em- powerment of real-time systems, they will begin to embrace them more. While there is a unique set of restraints to this new method, including 30 fps, the advantages are many. "Creativity is about iteration, experimentation, and collaboration. When you can do that in a more intuitive way, you will get better images and story." "It really transcends from a certain point of view of what people think of as a game en- gine," says Moran of the demo. Today, visual effects has reached the point of being synonymous with photorealism, and Libreri is confident that within the next five years, the industry will have crossed the Uncanny Valley (see "Almost Human," page 50). And real time will be ready for that. "Our fidelity level in real time was decades behind pre-ren- dered imagery not so long ago, but now it is just a few years behind," Libreri points out. "It is getting better and better. It is now about the workflow and letting the artists get creative, as opposed to simply mim- icking nature. I think what you will see, especially with virtual reality, is that storytelling will be told in the real-time domain, so people can be involved." Libreri further predicts that on the horizon will be studios pro- ducing live-generated content, whether for the PC, Mac, tablet, iPhone, or Android devices, all rendered in the cloud. "We have amazing power capabilities now to render high-end graphics on the fly," he says, noting that the Epic Games demo could have easily been generated live from Amazon Cloud or Google Cloud, direct to consumers. Aer all, the tools are readily available – it can be done with Unreal Engine 4.8 running on a home computer. "[Real time] will open a new world in terms of how animation companies think about their content and how their content evolves over time," Libreri says. "We want to inspire other artists to explore real-time technology in video games and as a hybrid between the two worlds [of gaming and filmmaking] to tell stories and share experiences." While the storyline of "A Boy and His Kite" illustrates life's sim- ple pleasures, the actual produc- tion is a story of revolution, a new way of filmmaking that could change the genre forever. ■ CG Techniques in 'A Boy and His Kite' • Dynamic direct/indirect illumination • Cinematic depth of field and motion blur • Procedurally placed trees and foliage • Physically-based rendering • Raytraced distance field/so shadows • Full-scene HDR reflections • Distance field ambient occlusion • 2-sided foliage shading model • 15 million pieces of vegetation • Temporal anti-aliasing • Procedural asset placement (deer) • Dynamic global illumination from height fields • Photometric sampling of real-world data • Subsurface scattering • 500 sculpted blendshapes • Everything blended in real time Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Graphics World.