I JUST WANT TO CREATE
When I was working on the storyboarding episode of Anigen, I came across this tool, I guess you could call it a machinima tool, which offered realtime animation and moviemaking to what seemed to already be a large user base. Naturally, as fate would have it, I didn't save the link to this tool and now I can't find it. Still, I've been thinking about it, or the idea behind it for a long time now.Pixar is by no means quaking in their boots based on the sample animations from these tools, but I still think the writing is on the wall. A new era is coming if not already here. People with ideas, who may not be able to animate one frame in a package like Maya will have the power to make their films. The reason I say this is because I am visualizing a combination of puzzle pieces.
Most of the users of these tools have no concept of filmmaking. They choose bad camera angles or fly the camera all over the place like 1st year CG students. They don't know lighting, pacing and many other aspects of storytelling. Of course I also keep in mind that all of this is based on what we are used to, sometimes culturally, and none of these rules came down the mountain with Moses. The point, though, is this: I have yet to see a big time studio animator or major pro Maya or Lightwave guy pick up these tools and try something. What would this artist create?
A pro artist picking up these tools and trying something is only one piece of the puzzle I see in my mind. The other is the quality of assets. Most users are creating with Quake II or Half Life or even the Sims. Not a lot of chance of getting Final Fantasy quality with those dated engines. But what happens when someone creates with the engine of Doom 3?
Not even from a video game standpoint, but from Machinima or what have you, Doom 3 is a tool for amateur developers to create stuff. Then the game as well; it's really almost unprecedented in terms of the power it provides people to do things. Obviously we're doing a lot of cool stuff with DOOM 3 the game, but now people are going to have something that approaches film quality in the level of visual presentation, on a real-time basis. So if you're in film school and looking to make animated films, this is the cheapest package you're going to get when the game comes out -- a lot cheaper than Maya.
That's what the CEO of id Software said in an interview with Game Arena. But Doom 3 will soon be surpassed. What about the quality of tools that will be found on the PS3 for realtime? I mean, there's going to come a point where just like Steve Job's showed that a modern Mac can render Luxo Jr., the first Pixar short, perfectly in realtime, it will take fewer years for a realtime engine to do Final Fantasy quality. I mean if a person were to go into Doom 3, and really change out every model and create entirely new content inside, how close would it be now? What could that artist create? That's what I am looking for.
I just want to create. I realize I am not interested in tools and feature lists the next cool thing in the next big 3D package. I lost interest in that a while ago. I am interested in the package not getting in my way!
6 Comments:
I almost wonder if it isn't more likely that 3D packages will offer a realtime rendering mode based on the graphics cards, rather than software rendering. They finally picked up doing live previews. Now it is just a matter of defining a set of presets for the content you are making and enabling realtime views. Pick a quality level for the assets and see if it renders realtime. Tweak away. Who knows? It might be possible to render realtime at low resolutions already if you don't go crazy with materials, polys, and shaders.
The thing with game engines is that they don't have the content creation tools so why not just move the rendering over to the tools you have to use anyway?
Unreal 3 has a great set of tools as far as sets and even camera controls and scripting, but in the end the modelling and animation has to be done somewhere else. Also you don't quite have a pipeline set up for easy compositing there.
I see where you are going with your musings but the real question is how much can realtime rendering help? I am not sure it saves that much time unless you are animating something with enough content reuse that quickly rendering out different scenes gains you a big efficiency advantage.
Of course if you only have one machine to work on then you want your rendering as fast as possible so I could see big gains there, if you are willing to adjust your quality expectations.
Machinima has been around awhile now, but I haven't heard that it really leads to big time gains, only that it is very cheap and easy to use. There have been some flicks with original content too BTW, but nothing that has made a big impact (that I am aware of).
I think an anime experiment with a realtime engine would be interesting because the right style could be suited to the lower detail levels realtime demands. Hmm.
I do know exactly what you mean by not thinking about the tools though. The interface and workflow have to really recede into the background so that you can focus on being creative with what you make, rather than thinking about how you can make it.
Game-engine realtime doesn't help much beyond the immediacy and the possibility for limited pseudo-motion capture with the mouse and keyboard. ...Which is ideal for some projects: low-budget, high-concept projects that rely more on their writing than on their visuals. Here I am thinking of Red vs. Blue, but I can see how it would also be useful in preproduction.
The problem with realtime playback/recording is that you have to create in realtime as well. Sure, a Mac might be able to play back Luxo Jr. in realtime, but it will still take an animator a much longer time to animate all the aspects of the scene -- probably about the same amount of time as it took the original Luxo animators, actually. Humans haven't gotten any additional processing power since then, and animation by hand is dominated by human processing time.
In fact, you might say that hand animation is the antithesis of realtime recording. One of the appeals of hand animation is that it concentrates artistic decisions over time; in a scene where a live-action actor might at best do a few takes, an animator may make hundreds or thousands of small adjustments to get the scene looking the way he wants. This can make animation appear less realistic, but it allows the animator to capture essential qualities that would be difficult to capture any other way. If you try to put the scene together in realtime, you lose all that.
BTW, it's funny that you mention doing Final Fantasy in realtime, since Sony had a Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within scene running in realtime at their booth at SIGGRAPH 2000. IIRC, they were using a machine based on 8 (or maybe 16?) parallel PS2 boards to render high-definition video of the main character floating in space, with tens of thousands of hairs, etc. They weren't able to create much in realtime other than camera moves -- but I'll bet it must have taken months of non-realtime work. I guess just about anything can be made "realtime" if you're willing to pour enough hardware or work into it.
I see what you mean, but I think we are talking apples and oranges. A very different kind of show. Those looking for the nuances of hand animation would not consider this route. That's an entirely different ball of wax.
You're right: they're looking for a quick solution. At least that's what I assume. I've yet to see a machinima where they use different characters than were in the game. Which is probably because it's at least as hard to create a character that looks good in a modern game engine as it is to create a character of similar quality for offline rendering.
Still... It might be useful for previz. Previz seems to be getting more and more popular these days, and anything goes as long as it gets the idea across. Which isn't totally necessary if you're the only guy on the show, I guess.
Say, you seem to have tried several prepatory techniques in earlier blog posts... How valuable do you currently find storyboards, previz, or animatics are if you're the only one working on the show?
It seems you're still considering a very different audience for the tools. What you say would be true if you imagine seasoned animators with mad modeling skillz deciding to do a machina film. But what I see is machinima opening the doors to people who may not be able to model or animate at all, but still have stories to tell. To them it would be like working with live actors.
I have seen a few machina films where they use different characters than in the game. Ther reason is precisely because it is much easier to mod a game character than to build a full character for offline rendering. Most game characters are a single solid mesh with one single texture, usually 512x512 or some 1024x1024 today. At the very least, some modders will simply paint what they want right over the top of the existing texture, but some will go as far as pushing and pulling points around to shape the character into what they want.
With tools like GMax around, game modding has become huge. I have seen anywhere from Astroy Boy to Darth Maul running around in Quake and Unreal games. This same method is easy to do for modding the game characters for a machina outting.
Those used to tools like Lightwave and Maya might look down on machinima as maybe good for previz, but imagine those who have never touched a 3D tool. The game engines are in the hands of millions after all while Lightwave or Maya has 50,000 total users or so. For this large audience, machina may seem a Godsend, because before this, there may have been no way for them to tell their story.
As for storyboards, when working on a project alone, I have found that if I put to much effort into storyboards or previz, then I will hav "gotten it out of my system", whatever it is that motivated the project in the first place. Once I get it out, the fire is gone and interest wanes quickly. I find it is best for me to write a simple outline and get right into doing the show. My process is, however, constantly being refined. I haven't found the end all soluton yet.
Terrence: Thanks for the info on the storyboarding. I agree -- motivation is a hard problem.
I agree with most of the rest of what you said, too, but you may be interested to know that making game models for the most recent games (like Doom 3, as mentioned in your article) has become much more difficult than in the Quake/Unreal days. While the polygon counts and texture sizes are still smaller than for cinematic characters, the normal mapping process (the big Doom 3 feature) requires that you build your model to near-cinematic detail -- which is why game companies are now looking for zBrush talent. Not that this will stop machinimists, but it implies that they are more likely to get stuck with the built-in game models in the newer games... After all, if they wanted to use crappier homebrew Quake models, they can do that now, for free.
So I'm guessing the Doom 3 machinima will have certain "common themes". I'm already looking forward to "Monty Python and the Hell-Knights of the Round Table", "Space Marines: On Patrol", and "Everybody Loves Cacodemon". :)
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