realtime:uk

RealtimeUK

With games development being such a competitive business, it’s not surprising that so many companies choose to shroud their new games in secrecy. Much of the next-gen animation work RealtimeUK has been involved in falls well within this confidential category.

We have great respect for our clients’ confidentiality and understand the necessity for these Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA’s). Being under NDA’s means we have been unable to showcase the ‘next-gen’ X-Movies (pre-games development CG films) we've been working on over the last 2 years and has meant we can’t show the movies that demonstrate that our studio has moved to the next level of character animation

Our ‘next-gen’ work really has reached a level above anything on our current web site, so we took it upon ourselves to invest time in producing our own atmospheric character driven piece which demonstrates cloth simulation and environmental effects which are in demand for next-gen cinematic movies and are all skills we have developed on these confidential projects.

Tony Prosser, Managing Director of RealtimeUK, commented that "creating, animating and lighting life-like characters is possibly one of the most challenging tasks that any animation studio faces so we've been very keen to make sure we're using the best techniques. Possibly the biggest variable in animating human faces is the development of the face rig used to control facial expressions and how the skin moves and deforms over the skull. I am extremely pleased with the results of this development piece as we've been able to develop a new rig that will accelerate the production speed for our client's projects and enable us to replicate even the most subtle of human emotions."
The first stage of this project was to develop the hero character, a 1930’s prohibition gangster, by creating mood boards and a storyboard. The basis of the animation is the hero character being pursued through the streets at night by a number of unseen villains.

Our friends at Audiomotion did a great job, as always, producing the Motion Capture for this short sequence. We found the most important aspect of this was the previews and rehearsals, so a storyboard, 3D animatic and a live action video were produced to ensure the timings were perfected beforehand.

One of the major features of the animation is the environmental effects. For the rain we studied video reference and also carried out R & D. The research we did for this project helped arm us with the necessary detail to recreate life-like rain within the animation.

The facial animation elements of the movie were one of the capabilities we wanted to demonstrate. We achieved this by using a custom rig which blended over 50 morph targets and moved through an animatable GUI (Graphical User Interface). The GUI was hand animated from video reference. We chose this method as opposed to a bone rig, because it enabled us to inject more detail and create more reliable shapes. However, we did have to integrate a rig to animate the morph targets so that we weren’t doing them all individually by hand. This gave us a good balance of usability and complexity.

On some of our more recent ‘next-gen’ work we’d explored different renderers, skin shaders and materials in order to achieve convincing looking skin within animation. We use Brazil Skin as the shader of choice. The Brazil Skin gives us the most convincing sub-surface scattering (SSS) as it comprises of sub-dermal scattering and back scattering, which when combined simulates the way that light penetrates and illuminates the skin.
Our team have also made some significant developments that allow us to streamline the cloth simulation process. This character was the first fully clothed character, which we are allowed to show, whose entire outfit was simulated using Max’s cloth and garment maker.

The development of our rig driven morph system has allowed us to progress our facial animation pipeline and has put us in a very competitive position to win more similar work in the future.

Realtime - Realising Reality

RealtimeUK