>> Just to introduce myself, I am Benji Thiem,
I am the Co-Creative Director at Capacity.
We are a design and animation studio
that has been around for over 14 years.
Originally, we got our start in the broadcast space.
And one of the things I want to talk about
is sort of a lot of the changes
the industry has been going through lately,
and how we have gradually gotten more
and more into real-time work.
But there are some very pivotal projects
that brought us to this point that we are today.
Originally, back in the day,
I remember when we first started using Cinema 4D
and they had first introduced global illumination, right,
and it took forever. But everybody was doing it,
because even though it took forever,
the quality difference was enough to justify it.
And now, jumping ahead,
we sort of built a team full of artists
that were generalists, all Cinema 4D artists.
And we were one of the first to adopt Octane
as a toolset for rendering.
Now, that was a crucial point in our history,
because GPU rendering really revolutionized
what we were doing in a creative field,
because GPU rendering had that immediate feedback of,
you can see, as you are working on something,
what the final result is going to be, right?
And that really primed us
for what the future was going to hold as well.
So I put together a few snippets here.
This is all not Unreal work,
it is all stuff that we have done over the years for clients,
and it is all rendered on GPU in Octane.
And one of the things I want you to think about is,
these are some of the most production-heavy moments
from a lot of the pieces that we have done.
And the emphasis here is,
we are not always striving for 100 percent realism,
we are striving to fulfill a creative goal.
And the most important thing there is
that we have the flexibility to follow our vision,
and make something happen out of it.
So that is kind of where our heads were at,
when we were thinking, okay, how do we get more flexibility?
How do we get more creative freedom?
How does a small team of artists take their abilities
and apply it to a big production,
without getting completely snowed under
by render times and technical issues,
and all of these things that we are used to dealing with?
So I wanted to do a little case study of a project
that we did that the whole team decided to jump into Unreal.
And it was really a leap of faith for us.
In 2017, the president of Promax Games,
Steve Kazanjian, approached us to be the design partner
on the Promax Games 2018 Summit.
So this was a conference to celebrate gaming,
and the people that work in gaming.
And since as a company a lot of our clients
are Blizzard Activision, Nintendo, Psyonix,
we have been doing a lot of work in this space already.
So we are super excited about the opportunity
to do a piece where we really showcase our love for gaming,
and sort of a progression
where you could see different types of games taking place.
So one of our goals for this project
was to take an entire team of people
who are not used to doing work
in real-time, everybody dives into Unreal,
and we do this whole project in Unreal.
At the time, we had one artist, Alex Kintner,
who was actually our concept artist,
but was pretty comfortable in Unreal.
And he was instructing us on some things,
but we did a lot of research ourselves.
And we decided to dive in and just see what we could make.
So the concept was to basically recreate San Francisco
in a stylized fashion, and create this vivid world
that was a celebration of all kinds of different game genres.
So at this point, our artists,
we are very comfortable right now,
because we are working all in Cinema, we are concepting,
we are modeling things out, we are rigging --
these are all things
that everybody's familiar with, right?
So at this point, we were just having a blast,
and kind of thinking of all the crazy things
that we could add into this piece.
But it was a little bit unclear, like, what are the hurdles
that we are going to run into when we do this?
So with the help of Alex, we jumped into Unreal.
The first big part of it was,
what animation systems can we bring into
Unreal that we have created in Cinema 4D,
and which ones do we have to rebuild in Unreal?
So we did a lot of exploration.
We ended up doing some of the particles in Cascade,
which worked out really well.
We built procedural animated textures,
using the node-based systems in Unreal.
And we basically created as much as we could,
including building all the environments.
We built them in Unreal as well.
So then came a challenge for our animators
and traditional Cinema 4D artists,
is how do we take all this animation
that we have been doing in Cinema for our animatics,
and translate those over to Unreal?
At the time, there was not really clear documentation
about how to do this,
so there was a lot of experimentation involved;
like what do you have to do to bake out a Character animation
and bring it into Unreal?
What do you do if it is a dynamic Object,
and you want to bake that out and bring it into Unreal?
So we did a lot of experimentation.
And there were certain things at the time
that did not work as well, but I am happy to say that now
that process has become completely seamless.
We have it down where even without baking Characters,
we can bring them from Cinema to Unreal.
There is a new Datasmith Plugin which just got announced,
which allows you to open an entire scene in Unreal,
so you can actually save out your Cinema 4D file
using the Save for Melange feature,
which is now being rebranded the Save for Cineware feature.
And you can save out your entire Cinema scene,
open it in Unreal, the hierarchies come through,
and everything. And that is just --
the process is becoming so seamless now that there is --
like for us, we had built this whole thing
using a more difficult process. And now it is so much easier.
So I am going to loop the final piece that we made,
while I talk about some of the things
that we got out of this process of working with Unreal.
First of all, what really blew our minds
was that all the things that we conceived in the creative
brainstorming, we were actually able to include.
Because once we had a base, we sort of built a map out,
we had the Characters.
Once we had that base, iteration, changing things,
adding things, was so quick and so easy,
because everything is happening in real-time, right?
So this is actually a pretty long piece.
But we were not faced with weeks of rendering.
We were not faced with all those usual problems you run into.
So that was a huge thing.
So leading right off of that
is the concept of a production timeline.
When you are working
in a traditional pre-rendered pipeline,
you have to schedule 25 percent to 30 percent of your project
just for rendering, compositing, fine-tuning, all that stuff.
And while it is still good practice
to have a locked in date where you are locking picture,
it is important to note, with a project like this,
where you have everything existing in real-time,
there is no need to stop changing things
at a certain point.
You can, the day before a project is due,
you can change the Character animation,
bring it back through the process,
re-render it in a matter of minutes.
So it completely changes the way you can view production
and it puts a lot of control in the creative's hands,
which is what is important to us.
And that also leads to the idea of compositing.
Compositing is a really interesting thing,
because even back when we were doing GPU rendering,
we started to realize that a lot of the reason
our composites were so huge was,
we were trying to avoid having to go back and render stuff.
You are trying to build in flexibility
by doing all these passes,
so that you can change things in the future, right?
Well, when you have an Unreal workflow,
there is no reason to not just go back into the project,
make the visual tweaks that you want there,
and then re-render it, because the render time
is almost non-existent, right? So the interesting thing, too,
is that there is a lot of built-in tools
for color correction, lens effects, things like that,
that you would normally do in post, post-post,
as we like to call it.
And now you can just handle them in Engine.
So my recommendation is that
if you are going to jump into this process,
take it as far as you absolutely can within Unreal,
and then from there, you might have to only do
a couple of tweaks in compositing.
And then the other factor is the Sequencer.
A lot of people do not really understand
the power of the Sequencer.
But basically, you can do entire edits in Unreal,
so you do not have to render out shot by shot,
bring it into Premiere,
or bring it into After Effects and put it all together.
You could technically have your whole
Sequence just living with the audio in Unreal,
and be able to preview it there. So these are all things
that are really helping our production along the way.
One thing, a happy surprise,
we recently did a two-minute trailer
that was a 4K trailer for a gaming company, right?
And usually, delivery process is interesting, right,
you are delivering this huge render,
and then sometimes the client needs some kind of flexibility,
or they might need to change things in the future, right?
Well, normally, we are faced with, okay,
which files do I collect out? Do I make them an AE collect
that has certain components of this?
Or do I have to also save out the 3D files
that went into the AE collect,
so that they have the flexibility they need?
Well, with this trailer that we recently did,
we delivered the entire trailer, which was rendered at 4K,
and alongside of that, we delivered one Unreal project
that was eight gigs that could render every single shot
that had created that trailer.
And the client could go in and make any last-minute changes
they needed for legal reasons,
or whatever, and it was not a hassle on us.
They did not have to charge us overages --
it all made total sense.
So the delivery process is changing,
the way we see compositing is changing.
So many things are being affected by this.
Another thing I wanted to mention, too,
that is a huge workflow thing is,
as traditional artists,
we were not really used to the idea of version control.
So normally, the way we would do things is,
we would have our 3D files,
we would have an artist work on them,
and then we would hand the files back and forth.
And they would have to kind of see, oh, okay,
this is how they set it up,
and this is where I go from there.
With Unreal, it is all set up in a way that you can apply
something like Perforce version control,
and then all of a sudden, you can split out your scene.
So you have one shot. You can say, okay,
one artist is now working on the environment,
one artist is now working on the lighting, one artist
is now working on Cinematic Cameras and animations.
And they are all working simultaneously.
And with one sync of a button,
those all combine into a master file
that can be rendered out. So that is another thing.
When you are up against a deadline,
and you do not know how you are going to pass all your files
back and forth in time to get a render up
and get it out, it is so helpful to be able to have
that simultaneous workflow that syncs,
and then being able to render in real-time,
you can just get shots out the door faster than ever.
So these are all things that we have sort of learned
over the process of working with Unreal.
And this was over a year ago that we did this.
Since then, we have done a virtual set for NFL RedZone.
We have done a lot of smaller projects with Ross Video.
And recently, we did an entire trailer with Psyonix
for the new Radical Summers event
that was all rendered in Unreal,
and we even included a lot of ray tracing features as well.
And so this type of work is just taking off for us.
It is an amazing process. We are super into it.
We have a couple of big projects launching right now.
And by the way, if you want to check out
the Radical Summers trailer --
I could not show it here because there are so many
IPs involved, but it is a really cool piece,
and it is on YouTube,
if you just look up Radical Summers Rocket League.
And you can kind of see where we are taking this process.
So we are in the midst of exploring how far
we can push the production, how much realism we can add in,
what can we do with Character animation.
And we are super excited of being able to work
with the new tools that
MAXON and Unreal have been working with, together.
So yeah, it is a bright future for us,
and we just wanted to be here to share what we are doing,
and where we see the industry going.
Thank you!
[APPLAUSE]