The work completed on last years projects for Ypres and Passchendaele are entries into this years Animation Effects Awards Festival 2018. really proud of the har work done by such a small and talented team and hope it all pays off.
Real-Time animation
More recently announced is the The Mills' real-time animation system (RTAS) which utilises real-time rendering technology and a custom-built, CGI virtual production pipeline to create any character.
The catch line is Ever wanted to direct, perform and animate CG characters in real-time?
The quality looks amazingly impressive, as always from this Studio, but anymore information is a little thin on the ground. Would be interesting to see what aspects are real-time and where in the pipeline does it expose immediate feedback resulting changes for the client?
From the Monster.com 'Opportunity Roars' commercial TVC breakdown, the character has muscles system, fur etc. This is a fantastic achievement in processing and development if this is all real-time. Lots of grunt behind the system if it is.
Siron - real-time character performance
Epic games collaborating with 3Laterial, Cubic Motion, Tencent and Vicon to have live capturing of human performance driving a digital avatar.
Final results are below which are pretty impressive. Some nuances in the face and particularly around the mouth which give a hint of uncanny valley but generally this is a massive leap forward in real-time driven performance.
Unreal real-time ray tracing
First public demo of real time ray tracing using unreal. Announced at GDC 2018 and showing a massive jump in quality for real time rendering. A fantastic step forward in the convergence of games and films and all the skill sets required. Great to see and looking pretty amazing!!
Next-generation rendering features shown in today’s demo include:
- Textured area lights
- Ray-traced area light shadows
- Ray-traced reflections
- Ray-traced ambient occlusion
- Cinematic depth of field (DOF)
- NVIDIA GameWorks ray tracing denoising
UE4 Rendering - Animated series Zafari
This looks like a really great use of the unreal engine to produce animation content. Zafari is an upcoming TV series which is using UE4 as part of the animation pipeline. I hope this is really the start of many more projects that take advantages of the quality you can get from these amazing third party engines.