yeah I think we have sound yeah you can
hear me okay cool uh Mr sound man could
you please lower the lights a little bit
we don't like to be in this Spotlight
we're
nerds so it's important that you can see
the screen well because we're going to
show a lot of visual stuff
today perfect okay I think we should
just uh start I think it's time yeah
sure okay welcome everybody it's nice to
to see you nice that you took uh took
the time to come here to this room and
uh visit us uh we are going to um talk
about how we ended up making a whole new
animation production workflow uh
combining like classic 3D animation uh
with new real-time game engine features
where we actually record puppet
animation using uh this Xbox controller
that exact yeah this one this I I use
this for work um we're going to do a
present presentation of of the project
and then we're going to do try to do a
live demo which is always very scary uh
of unreal on this laptop live for you to
see how it works and after that I think
we'll spend probably 30 minutes together
and then the last 30 minutes you're
welcome to uh come up on stage and try
it yourself or uh talk to us or ask us
any questions and also feel free to just
ask during the presentation uh just keep
it yeah keep it simple yeah so um I
think we'll just start yeah
yeah uh yes my name is uh Runa I'm a
self-taught senior 3D animator and bfx
compositor uh I've been working in the
TV and film industry since
1993 which makes me really old uh I work
in several animation companies in Norway
and I run my own campany company for a
couple of years before I got employed in
the design department at nrk in 20
2006 yeah and for those who don't know
nrk is uh the government um funded
Channel like the BBC or the Denmark
radio of Norway yeah uh I'm also working
there uh I have a bachelor of Animation
degree and I've been working with web
design and web development and animation
and lots of stuff uh at the no since uh
around 2004 uh but I've also released a
couple of uh of computer games uh in my
own uh as a solo developer
yeah yeah that's
us okay so let's go back to what the big
challenge um like during uh coid and
home office working um the children's
department at an okay they had booked 14
episodes of uh animation for a new show
called fs and the machines uh where this
character little cute character fantus
was going to look at different uh types
of Machinery like tractor and bulldozers
and excavators and sort of a yeah it's a
like learning show about cool machines
yeah total about like 30 minutes of uh
animation yeah so we thought okay 30
minutes we are two people how the hell
are we going to manage to do all that
work because yeah from home and we'd
actually never met during that we just
uh met over over slack yeah so let's
just first let's rewind a bit and and
give some background to to to what we're
going to talk about yeah because uh nrk
has had its own characters for older
kids since
2006 but in 2019 we wanted to try out A
New Concept for the younger ones like
one to two year old kids and uh then
fontas was born it's the little purple
guy in the middle
here uh he was originally developed for
mini kids which is uh it was like a test
project made we were like a small team
only six people I think and
uh yeah so and it quickly became super
popular and everyone just wanted more
and more and more yeah uh Fus became a
superstar for for the kids and for the
parents who wanted to drink their
morning coffee when their kids were
looking at the at the television yeah so
they uh they actually made a physical
puppet of him and implemented him into
the shows for the older kids and other
stuff and it became a season two and a
season three and this sounds good but uh
actually there is a problem and U to
understand why it is a problem we have
to look at the way we produced this
because it was like short episodes of
just Fus in 3D so it was quite a lot of
work so yeah that's the context yeah it
was done like in a traditional 3D
animation workflow uh but we had
optimized did quite a bit so we had just
a one frame storyboard like a idea slate
and then uh we made a blocking pass we
we just moved fontas through the scene
without actually animating him just to
get a sense of the time needed for him
to do all the stuff he needed to do and
then we sent that blocking pass to the
sound people and
they uh where am I and they uh uh the
voice actors used this to record the
dialog dialogue of the voice of thus
yeah then I got it back and I used that
blocking pass to
uh uh and the voice recording to animate
the whole sequence and uh it's uh this
is the traditional way of working this
is how Pixar works when they make their
animation uh
films yeah and see all the red the lines
the bottom here that's key frames that's
where we lock his uh
is position in space and as you see it's
almost all the frames all the time this
takes a lot of time to do and
U yeah it is it is lot of work to
because you have to pose him in and move
all the his body positions and pose him
in all these different key poses that
you and then the the the I guess the the
the machine does some sort of in between
this it does the inbetweening but still
there's a lot of key friends lot of work
yeah and then when that part was done we
had the rendering and uh that's the
final calculation which makes the
realistic image you see on TV and it uh
even this simple thing took like between
15 minutes and two hours per
frame and we had like 3,000 frames in
each episode to render so you can do the
moth it's a long render very long
render uh yeah here you can see the yeah
this this is the the blockin part in the
beginning here then we fade over to the
final rendered
images and between these two passes
there's a lot of work many many
hours and uh it quickly became uh
obvious that it was too much work for
one
person to do all this 3D work yeah
because all this uh F before had only
been done by Runa so he was the sole
animator on on these uh previous Seasons
yeah and uh yeah so and I knew that the
children's department they would want
more and more and more so that's why I
started looking into unreal to see if
there was something we could do to save
time I quickly figured out it was not
suitable for this so
uh because he's like moving around all
the time he's touching stuff and yeah
it's difficult task to to do in a real
so one week later
we got a request for a new show actually
which was fontas and the
machines and here fontas is just going
to walk around and look at stuff and
point and wave and not touch anything so
it was perfect yeah for a workflow with
Unreal Engine yeah uh just quickly
Unreal Engine what what is it um it is a
game development engine um a suit of
software you use to produce computer
games it's a free to download and use
and it's uh being used not only in the
games industry but also like in
architecture
visualization U business and in special
effects in TV like the Star Wars shows
where they use unreal to make like fake
backgrounds behind the actors uh it's
also being uh used uh a little bit in TV
broadcasting because it's such a
powerful 3D engine that runs in real
time and nrk had started uh we had
started testing it out for some very
simple 3D Graphics white dots yeah some
small dots and some like testing out see
if it's was VI viable for for TV
production because 3D TV production is
quite expensive and timec consuming so
this was yeah we were sort of testing
the waters and see can we do something
cool with unreal then uh yeah not
nothing like what we were going to do so
anyway uh my initial thought was just to
make a simple Loops in Maya which is my
main program and um put them into
unreal and uh put them together and
render with unreal yeah that's just some
simple like you would make some simple
waves and points and because font was
just going to look he was just going to
stand there and point and look he was
never going to move actually but then
moir came back yeah and he had this
great idea that maybe just maybe we
could use the game controller and move
him around and so we did yeah I guess so
um because I had been out from nrk for a
couple years developing a 3D game uh as
a solo Dev and I came back with um uh
with some new found knowledge about
creating characters and I had this idea
when I saw Duna character I thought hey
maybe we could make fontas as an actual
game character and um usually um uh when
you make a a game character you have um
you have a model uh you yeah
the yeah like the the actual mesh of the
model that this is fontus and inside
there's a skeleton rig you can see the
these are his uh bone bones actually and
run uses these bones to it's the same
rig actually that we use in Maya but
it's transferable to unre you move the
bones and thus moves with the bones but
the cool thing about uh uh unreal is
that you can have these animations that
are run made but I can also override
them in in a real in real time I can
twist them and move them and scale them
and and move them around um so I thought
maybe we should try to to see if we can
sort of combine animation and real time
using this this game
controller uh so uh like a character has
like I said it has a body has a skeleton
it has usually a state machine uh which
defines all the states or the animations
uh that the the character can use or do
and it has like a character uh
controller uh that handles the inputs or
the events that we want to happen is
more I bit like the the brain of the of
the show and um we're going to show like
all this we're going to show you like
for real in a real afterwards so but of
course this was easier said than done I
had not used unre much at all neither of
us had we had opened it and yeah so it a
lot of work just trying to figure out
stuff and this here is uh fountain's uh
State machine as as of today these are
the things that he can do he can sort of
uh he can jump uh he can turn left and
right and he has this idle position
which which is basically a a a central
position that we go out from it's like
the root position of hus so yeah most
almost everything has to go through the
idle position so he can stop go from
idle and do jumps and uh turns and he
can point and he can do all sorts of
stuff in this uh State machine that we
built for Fountain this um this is a
very common way of linking uh animations
in a character because you need to know
that you can't play two animations at
the same time that would probably be a
bad
thing uh and this is sorry for the
spaghetti all the coders out there sorry
uh we're using blueprints in uh in
unreal uh so it's a it's a messy but
somehow easy for us to to understand how
this works uh these are all the events
or the triggers that uh are that font
fontas can do like if you press a button
here uh uh up here like here the buttons
they will do all these different things
that yeah so uh that's how how this is
sort of set up and of course I'm going
to show you afterwards in uh in
onreal yeah there's
uh there's one problem with a normal way
of moving a character in the game
because normally you you control the
character with your controller and it
moves the character and then it plays
the animation of like the feet moving or
whatever and in approximately the
correct speed this leads very often to
like the feet sliding on the ground and
if there's anything an animator hates
it's sliding feet
so we couldn't have that at least not if
you wanted to replace the hand animation
animated look we had in the mini kids so
uh what we ended up using instead is uh
something called root
motion and this is a system where the
animation the movement of the character
is baked into the animation so the
actually the animation itself actually
moves the character along its path in
space in space yeah yeah so the
character just follows along with with
Run's animation yeah and that's good
because then you get like the he moving
from side to side and all that little
stuff that we would have lost if we have
just moved him along yeah uh and the
feet are stuck to the ground which makes
me happy
yeah uh but it it's it is a little
harder to get the looping to work
because it not only has to Loop in time
but also in space so and uh it limits
speed changes a little bit but all in
all it was a good way of doing it yeah
it looked much better when uh like my
first prototype where he was just
sliding and walking and rotating it
didn't look too good but he was so happy
though yeah it worked but it would
looked bad okay so um so we got him
moving that's that was good uh the next
part of the puzzle was because fontas
was actually going to be in the real
world he he was going to look at real
Machinery film before like this was
pre-recorded materials uh of like
tractors or excavators or stuff uh so we
needed a way to see uh the actual video
Behind fontas to to play AC him out in
in real time so on the on the screen
you'll see sort of a composite of uh
this is he he's this is font uh and this
he he walks inside this flattened Dome
almost like a sphere that is flattened
and onto this uh Dome we project the
video from the camera
onto no matter where the virtual camera
is we will always see the background and
then we have to match the the the camera
position in unre to perspective to get
so the camera angle the camera width the
camera height uh everything has to match
and we do that by by hand and also we
have to set up lights so the sun shines
in the correc way um to to get get him
sort of into the world where you can
have shadows on the ground yeah um there
was also one more thing that we got from
using and will is that we could use the
voice recording from fontus the actor
who played fontus and we took the voice
recording and we took the loudness of
the audio file to drive the bone of his
jaw so we could get like mouth movements
for free we didn't have to animate the
Lip lip sync so we just let the actor
play and then Fontes was just like blah
blah blah blah doing the same talk as
the actor so that was a lot of uh work
saved saved time yes definitely so and
then uh we had to make uh make sure that
we could actually record this animation
because now we've made a a character
with the with which we could control
like a game character in in any other
game um and what you see here is uh a
recording of what I I've done here with
fontas and I can I can see you can see I
can scrub back and forth It's almost
like video editing almost after we're
done so you can uh see you can we can
change a little bit of the animation
maybe the angles maybe you should point
a little bit different so it's a very
flexible and very uh intuitive way of of
working yeah but he's still 3D so you
can still like moving move the camera a
little bit if you yeah if it's a bit off
and um uh yeah so it's it's a very uh
new it's almost like recording motion
capture where you actually instead of
using a motion suit and a big Studio we
just capture his motion with the Expos
controller and save this uh his
animation as the 3D file inside and this
is something that en real actually has
built in as a take recorder you can
actually take record gameplay from a
game inside the engine
yeah yeah there was
um one another big advantage of using
inre is like their lack of rendering
time uh each of these episodes uh
rendered in couple of
minutes whil doing this in in Maya would
take days or maybe weeks remember the
3,000 frames times 2 hours hour
yeah
so this was a huge time saer in just
like the final stage
too it actually took longer to for you
to send the files to the VFX Department
the have crappy internet line at home so
so it was faster to render than actually
copy the files over the network yeah
yeah I think it was like 15 minutes to
render the First episodes and then I
would have to spend a week to copy it
over to work so anyway working from home
yeah yay anyway so so creating this
controllable version of
fontas and uh making the system of
displaying the video in the
background and uh the system for
recording the animation and lip sync in
real time and rendering really really
fast resulted in
[Music]
this
yeah so this was the trailer for the
first
season uh we made in total 14
episodes um and includ including the the
research and development time from home
office the two of us made it in about
three months yeah little over three
months the total for 14 epis TV world
that's super quick yeah that's that's
fast so the result of this uh was it was
an amazing success for nfk super that
like the children's Department it was
actually the fifth most watched TV show
in Norway uh it was sold to a bunch of
countries it got three more more seasons
and another like with the animals and it
has the Seas the machine seasons have
like 50 million views in Norway which is
we're like five million people
so it's a pretty crazy uh view numbers
because uh yeah it's a show that both
tra and cute animals I mean good
combination both the dad and the kid is
Happ so that's how we uh sort of ended
up solving this uh problem of creating
uh Lots of Animation in a short amount
of time creating a whole new um system
of uh
animating uh and even epic games uh got
in touch with us and and wanted to know
more about this process because uh in
the in the VFX business they usually use
uh uh unre for the backgrounds it's not
so often that you use it for like the
main character so they were really
interested in what we've been doing so
with that I think uh it's time to go to
the demo um it's a bit scary just so you
know maybe something crashes I hope
you're fine with that and of course
after we've uh after I've done some uh
show you some of the unre stuff you
we're going to sort of end the
presentation then you can just come up
here if you want to try yourself play
around if you have some questions or
yeah just please come up and try yeah
yeah yeah yeah don't feel feel uh
embarrassed please uh come it's we we're
friendly I'm just going to quit out here
and go to un yeah you can see un real
yeah okay so so now we are in in the in
the scene that I sort of showed the
composite of before uh I can probably
move around this is fontus in a
wireframe version you can see this is
the the the Dome I talked about like no
matter where we position the camera we
will always look at the video from the
background so we don't have to match the
the video and the background they would
always sort of fit we only have to match
the camera compared to the real world
camera and the camera you can see only
to the flat ground actually so here is
like you can see the purple thing here
that's the that's the camera looking at
fontos and here is the the sunlight
casting the Shadow and if I go to a more
different view you should probably see
it yeah so here we are looking at fontus
and what if we go to the camera this is
sort of how what the camera looks like
in in unre we can see fontas is here um
the light is there and now I'm going to
try see if this
works okay see yay it works okay cool
okay so now I'm controlling fontus um I
can make him like maybe I should be like
this so you can actually see me
controlling him so I can uh I can make
him walk
around uh I can make him turn around and
look at the camera maybe hello
Copenhagen and I have this shortcut
button I can always press this to make
him look at the camera or I can make him
look at some we have an object in space
that we can move around so we can always
follow his we don't have have to hand
animate his face to look at something we
can just have this Focus point that he
will always look at automatically also
saves us a lot of time so now the focus
point is somewhere behind here in the in
the background and uh like there's a
limit of how many buttons you have on
these controllers and how many fingers
we have them so so there like there's
not too much like we can do in real time
but he can be like enthusiastic he can
wave he can do some clapping I think he
can jump and he can yeah you can fall on
this butt probably get up as well uh
let's see we can uh quickly turn around
he can point uh so yeah he can sort of
yeah tilt his head a little
bit uh yeah very
good so now I'm going to see like if
this was um a a TV show or an episode
we're actually going to work uh work on
uh I would press the the big record
button up on the you see the f03 take I
would press that button and then I would
start recording whatever I'm doing here
and this would save as a as a 3D file of
F's movement so let's just try I'm not
going to record it because that's a bit
slow but I'm I'm just going to pretend
that we're recording so if I press play
now we should be able
to hi F hi
[Music]
f
[Music]
youe yeah that would that would be like
a okay that was a decent take but what
the cool thing have to do it all over
again know that the thing is that the
the the cool thing about working like
this it's very different from animating
uh like in the traditional way of of
like post to POS this allows for much
more freedom and creativity and oh uh if
the director wanted to see this we could
just screen grab it and send it to him
in in a in a couple of minutes and he
said no fun should actually be uh in
this scene he has to come from this side
because of some reason
or or maybe oh no I want him to like
when the the car comes in I want him to
go like oh fall and then point or yeah
it's almost like being in the studio
actually with the like the real puppets
and stuff it's so so it's kind of the
same workflow as they do in the studio
and if something doesn't work we don't
animate it again we just we don't fix it
we just take a new shot take a new shot
and try again so it's it's a it's a
whole new way of of working uh as as an
animator uh and it's like quite a lot of
fun as well um I'm going to show you
something that's um not official yet uh
it's the sneak peek of the new uh
project that we've been working on for
last six seven eight months because they
of course they wanted more yeah because
this was so popular and they said okay
we need more F more fontas more fontas
and uh now we've been working on a new
um new show where fontas is going to
play with kids in the studio and that's
a whole another ballpark I mean that's
very different from just pointing and
looking at something now it's gonna
walk around he's gonna do the same
things as the other toddlers in studio
like climb up on top of stuff and jump
down craw balance uh so we had to make a
lot of of new animations and as you saw
uh on the like we have a limited amount
of buttons we we can't make more
functionality because we we don't have
more buttons and it's really hard to
remember if you if we had more buttons
we actually bought these expensive Xbox
controls with extra buttons on the but
still it's it's it's too much they're
just the same buttons
yeah so um instead of limiting F to only
having his uh State machine control his
animations what we figured out is we can
do some really cool stuff we can in un
real since this is we have control over
his bones inside his body we can have
one animation play from the pelvis bone
down so you can walk around and then we
can mix it with another animation that
plays from the pelvis and up so we can
start of see combined versions where he
can he can walk around clap where we can
point and fall down so suddenly there's
a lot of more uh expressibility in in
F's repto and and then the timing thing
where we put yeah because we we uh you
saw me now play out the scene and it
wasn't too cool I I me messed up his
head Direction and stuff but uh what we
now do is that we can set uh uh in we
have like a a sequence that is playing
along with the animation recording we
can say um two after two seconds fontus
should fall down and after 3 seconds it
should get up and look at the camera and
laugh and then we can just set up these
event triggers yeah it's like having
extra buttons but you can precisely
control when they are going to fire and
also we have I'm going to show you now
the the other project that's not
official yet just let me open up takes
just a few seconds to open up
uh new um SE here in a level in uh
so here we are in this new show where
fontus is in with in the studio with the
kids I'm not sure if you can see can you
see this green thing over here like this
yeah so this is a uh the green thing is
a is a trigger that is based uh that is
a uh Collision trigger so we also made
functions that whenever FIS crosses or
collides with this trigger something can
happen maybe he placs animation maybe
falls down or so we can do like precise
stuff either in time or in space space
so this uh means that we have a lot more
control now than the first version and
it's a huge time saer too it's
absolutely and then we can sort of just
precisely take uh like set all the
different uh events to happen in there
so we're going to try to see see how
this works in this scene I've set up
this collider to um uh when fontus
collides he's going to try to crawl up
on this tile over here so this is uh a
much more complicated shot and I'm
probably going to mess it up uh but uh
here uh just have to click inside it's
very dark yeah it's a bit dark hang on
fix that
okay the post process down there now
it's oh it's so small usually like
working on in un whe you need a 4K
screen it's like full HD is it's not
good enough uh let's see here we go I
think this is better little better okay
so now uh I'm going to try to walk F in
going to have him look and then look at
this and I'm going to try to make I'm
going to clam that oh yeah it was a bit
uh and he almost does his balance can I
do can I walk it Oh and stop here he's
going to look down and he's gonna do a
jump big jump woo yay it worked and then
I could probably play the the video in
the background with the kids uh I don't
exactly remember uh the story in this uh
this shot but he the kidss are balancing
on these tiles and fontas is sort of
playing along with them yeah so yeah
it's kind of hard because they are
composited on you but you can bar you
can see some kids there I think in the
background and fontos is going to be
there playing with them and and sort of
yeah learning from learning from them
and and yeah it's little little bit like
monkey see monkey do uh so he is always
also gonna try to yeah do the things
that the kids
do and do uh whoa Jeff oh that was that
was pretty close yeah yeah so so this is
uh how we can do uh much more
complicated animations and of course
we've upped everything now we can do 4K
rendering in with rate tracing we got
the Shadows looking nice uh we're very
much very close to the the three the
like the 15 to two hour rendering time
per frame but still keeping it around
one to two seconds per frame so it's
still super fast to render it's super
fast to edit and it's even more accurate
now than before so uh I think we'll uh
it I think that's more or less uh what
I'm going to show I think maybe we
should just uh go back and sum up
the sum up the things we've talked
about yes so
uh big Pro is like the real time preview
stuff it's uh very nice to see what
we're doing
uh and really it's a really robust 3D
Engine with lots of
features uh the blueprint programming
node editor uh editing stuff is good so
even stuff people like him can yeah even
I can do do stuff I let him do it
so no but it's it's programming but in a
different way it's it's still logic it
still flows and still like uh you can do
anything but it's more easy for this ERS
and animators and coders to work
together in in this visual way yeah
there's very few limits but uh it's not
always uh easy to know exactly how to do
stuff because yeah there's a lot of beta
features and it's not stable and it's
not very well documented yeah and also
Unreal Engine is so big it can do almost
anything because it's an it's a game
engine you can make anything with it
basically and it's so hard to figure out
how you you have some ID and trying to
figure out how to actually do it is so
hard because it's not super well
documented and examples are not always
what you're trying to do so it's uh
sometimes very hard to figure out uh
your we have to like invent our own
workflows basically yeah all the time
and it says no true Shadow pass that's
that was a big problem for us because we
we had to send this to uh to the
compositing guys and they put it on the
real background later and without the
shadow it's so it's hard to to to link
him to the ground so we had to fake that
with the some extra rendering yeah can
if anyone's interested they can come
talk to us anyone and know anything
about Shadow passes in the real just
come talk to us because that's still a a
big headache for for like doing uh
compositing in in real
time yeah yeah I think I think that's uh
any questions if anyone has any
questions right now uh we can have some
and and of course after it we'll
yeah in a we white T-shirt
there
uh yeah
yeah the so the question is how did the
the voice actor know what to to say in
the in in the scene before they were
animated that was up actually up to the
director and the they just did a test
they they tested it and See Saw is this
okay like they Tred to they looked at
the background like we did actually and
then tried to figure out oh he would
probably laugh at the machine there and
so they had lots of of uh of background
video and they sort of okay I'm G to
imagine that fontos is here and he's
gonna say this and he and they just made
it uh script based on what they had
filmed yeah and then we adjusted our
stuff to the voice actually so so when
we got the final voice uh then we just
plug the voice into uh to fs and it just
went like this very easily but he's a
puppet it's fine most simple automatic
lip sync stuff ever yeah just rotating
the drawboard
yeah okay okay hi um so you calling
about beta feature what is what is
exactly the beta feature is it because
the actual background movie is that
including with the animation or uh so
there's a lot of things that are in beta
all the time almost everything like real
engine itself is uh in a comp like uh
like in flux it's it's always changing
each new version has something that
works better and something that works
less good um so uh lots of the beta
stuff that we used is um the take
recorder stuff was in beta when we
started using it the rendering rendering
is also very much like uh re R tracing
lots of it it's like uh do it uh on your
own like we don't take any
responsibility just don't use this in
production kind of uh so we did yeah so
a lot of the plugins that are in the in
the um project are beta plugins yeah I'm
just from on the top of my mind I can't
remember all the features that are not
but many of them are like bugs that are
still not fixed in the editor even like
the importing of some animation files
is it comes up this warnings all the
time but we just ignore them and then we
go on just ignore the warnings that's
the yeah um yeah yeah okay I was just
wondering so is it is it not blocking
for you to make sure you can make your
uh scene or because you were talking
about the old way I never saw that so
it's all new to me is that now
completely off the track and you're only
going this way or I think it's there's a
room for for both like the if you do it
by hand like moving fontas or any
character like in the traditional way
you get very precise you can make
perfect animation like he touches this
and he like does this this is hard to do
in real time can prean animate the stuff
it's hard to get then we have to put
everything but the cool thing now is
that we can we can combine these two
worlds we can Aruna or Brian who's
another animator working on this uh
children's new children's show they can
make very specific animations like we
can make I can make walk up to the this
place and uh the animators can make a
very specific animation that does like
so it looks perfect we have possibility
now to to export the animation actually
out of unreal and into Maya and yeah add
stuff and then take it back so we we're
more open to stuff it's a more flexible
system than than ever uh but of course
the the animation itself all the
movements of hun is still made by
animators and that's sort of important
to to note it's it's not that unreal
does all this animation for free it's
still like a handmade uh it's you can
show them the animation Library there's
yeah there's a lot of lot of work in the
in the animations of uh of on this it's
um it's kind of hard to see maybe even
here but uh found this like there's a
lot of animations here like all these
and all these are pre animated exported
out of Maya and then imported into a
real just small short usually loops that
we can sort of combine and use it's
almost back to the where I was intending
to go with cutting it together in a real
only we use the game controller do it in
real time so yeah okay clear thank you
sure anything
else hey um how many actions can
fountains do when you have the
controller right now it's uh three four
five six and then we have the shift
button so it's like 12 13 uh Real Time
stuff but of course you can map it you
can have like a midi controller maybe a
keyboard or we can have another guy with
another yeah because when you talked
about I was just thinking it doesn't
seem like there is a a a key issue but
you you were talking about I was
thinking like you could hold down a
trigger to do a modifier or something
like that and it would easily be about
that yeah and then I was also wondering
I don't know if this makes sense but
right now you're showing here up here
right that's like kind of exactly like
the world Works while you're recording
uh would it maybe make sense to do
something like in video games where you
have a UI layer where you could do stuff
so for example maybe you could have a
instead of a weapon wheel then you could
have a canned animation wheel or
something like that and then this UI
layer right it only exists in your view
but the view your exports different like
anything is possible like we could it
doesn't have to be it could be a fake
set it can be a real uh video it can be
things in front it can be things in back
in the back like uh if you have the
imagination and the the technical skills
like anything is really possible because
it's it's uh a very open sort of engine
yeah we set it up this way because it's
easy to control yeah in for TV
production so he moves in like a strange
way yeah he's like tank control he he he
he doesn't like you can't move him
around like in a like you would in as in
easy easy playable game yeah like moving
back and forth and sideways and then use
the triggers to to turn him so it's but
you can come and try yeah feel free
afterwards to to try yourself another
question you talked about one of his uh
views snapping to a focus Point uh that
Focus point is that a part of is that
set up as part of the environment yeah
yeah it's it's actually just a 3D object
that I made to to uh yeah that we just
animate to where we want him to look so
we do that on before we record so it's
this so in this sequence um I'm not sure
yeah yeah you see here it it's following
the the pink girl here so when he's uh
playing in this scene he will always
look at the pink girl and maybe on the
yellow uh here as well yeah so we do a
pass first and then just animate where
we would it's very simple just move this
eye around and Fontes will you can
choose when to look at it or not look at
it so it's uh
again very flexible anything is possible
yes okay nice cool and we can of course
override it
too if there are no more like uh yeah I
can have a question so in the beginning
you mentioned that you have a sphere on
which you map the the videos which they
sent you the sphere is static and the
fantos he work he moves on a plane which
is the the part we need is actually just
a floor the the reason we have the
sphere is to avoid any Shadows or stuff
in the backgound it's just so we can
move the camera around and always see
the like that's why it's a spare we have
to project the background to something
and then there's an invisible floor uh
that Fountain can walk on as well so if
or we can make like in this scene it's
actually I made some I think I made some
yeah these are actually like 3D tiles
that are placed in the scene so when
fontus walks across acoss on top he
actually walks on some some 3D object
that are matched uh just by ey in this
case so uh yeah but we we can do all
kind of stuff you can have like hidden
objects or hidden triggers it's uh yeah
anything is again anything is possible
everything is hard that's we can use
like uh we can use like a tracked camera
path too but luckily most of the shots
here are just static shots we can just
we made some some shots with track
camera as well and that's also pretty
cool yeah
yeah I think so thanks yeah that was
it