>> The Meerkat project was a deep dive
into a couple of main areas for us.
We wanted to continue some of the ongoing real time
for exploration.
And in parallel, we thought this would be
a really amazing opportunity
to look at the production of offline
rendered linear narrative media in the engine.
While we work directly with Epic's,
fur team and developers,
we were bringing our deep understanding
of the properties of hair,
how it responds under different kind of lighting situations
and helping them to kind of tune their systems
and ensure it met our requirements.
>> So at the beginning of the Meerkat project,
I being the pessimist that I am,
I thought it would be impossible.
>> We wanted to use this project as a bit of a test case,
really, to kind of step back from our proprietary systems
and work with more vanilla, off the shelf toolkits really.
>> Our modeler Nathan
would actually draw the fur in Yeti
and at that point, imported into Unreal.
>> The main thing I was worried about
was whether we could actually use a film level
asset in real time.
To be honest, I was quite surprised,
like the first time we built that meerkat
groom-- her name's Molly the Meerkat.
Molly had like a full dense groom that we would use in film.
And we were like, OK, that's our ground truth.
But that's probably not going to work in the engine.
And in the first time we dropped it in the engine,
it was surprisingly pretty performant.
I think the initial groom would have been maybe seven
or eight hundred thousand strands when that happened,
I definitely think I was like, OK,
I think we can probably pull something off pretty cool here.
>> To make realistic fur, one of the first things
that needs to be done
is to make sure that the shading of the fur
is physically correct.
>> The Unreal shading system is actually quite similar
to how WETA's works.
So it looked visually really great off the bat
and the engine, which was great.
>> We tried as best as possible
to recreate those kind of biological processes
that deal with the release and the timing of pigments.
So all of that stuff in the materials
is live essentially allow us
to change the timing of those release mechanisms
and shift the patterning along the length
of the individual strands
to recreate what you see in a meerkat
or a martial eagle feather.
>> Even for film doing birds
and feathers is definitely a challenge.
It was definitely a science experiment for us
just to see whether we could pull it off.
>> The feathers on the eagle pose some unique challenges.
So the solution that we ultimately settled on
was to take the strand that represents the spine
of each individual feather and turn that into geometry
and then push that geometry into our skeletal meshes.
So all of the individual spines for each feather
became part of the rig.
And that allowed Unreal Engine to then deal
with the projection of the barbs on the feather
so that we could get everything kind of behaving together
and moving,
as you would expect in the engine.
>> The one we actually ended up using
was about three point seven million strands.
Yeah, it definitely required a hell of a lot more strands
to really create that proper feather shape.
But it surprisingly was pretty successful.
>> Our animators were working in Maya.
We worked with LiveLink quite a bit,
which was really important for the animators, I think,
in terms of giving them a direct kind of understanding
and visual response for the various poses,
the shapes and read of the fur volume
under different lighting situations.
>> That's the big add of this whole workflow on the effects movies.
When you have something with fur, you have to expect filtration
of bake and render you have a long road
to go before to have feedback on the motion.
Most of the time there is frustration at the end
because you don't have time anymore
and you have to shut down the doors of the creativity
where with this example now it was the opposite.
I did some posing at the beginning with gray shade.
It was like very [INAUDIBLE] to pose.
Once we had the fur on it, I was like, OK,
this looks like a bear or something different.
Just because of the volume is so off.
>> Basically, when you're dealing with characters
with fur,
it's a little bit like you're animating a wet cat.
You know that there's going to be all this change
that's going to occur after you're done.
You kind of have to imagine what that's going to be.
It's one of the nice things about delivering
in a real time way like this.
We can work more in parallel with the lighters knowing
that we can both be working on the shots
right up to the very end.
>> This project was insanely fun.
You know, you feel proud of the work that came out.
>> You know, as you can see with Meerkat,
with the advances of the strand based rendering technology
in Unreal and with off the shelf tools,
talented artists
are able to create some really beautiful work.
>> Anyone in their basement can just start coming up
with cool little creatures.
And it's more about the creativity
and the amount of skill and artistry
that people can bring into it.