AARDMAN EMBRACES VR
AARDMAN ANIMATIONS DIRECTORS DAN EFERGAN AND DARREN DUBICKI DISCUSS THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS OF THE STUDIO’S OCULUS RIFT VR ANIMATION, WE WAIT
1 THE INITIAL CONCEPT
“We thought about how to tell a story without touch controllers and fell upon the idea of eye contact – either looking at characters to interact or conversely being asked not to look at other characters – to drive emotion”, says Darren Dubicki. “The migrant crisis was in the papers at the time and we felt the focus was on politics and facts rather than the human angle. The expectation with VR is that it’s about rollercoaster rides and balancing on high ledges, but we started right at the other end of the spectrum.” 2 DESIGN AND STORYBOARDING
“On the art side, the concept art, lighting keys and other early stage work are all identical to those for traditional animated projects, though the script was turned into a series of interaction diagrams much like you’d use for games development,” says Dan Efergan. “We also used plasticine and Lego to act out, block and previz.”
3 LOOK DEVELOPMENT
“The look was driven both by artistic and technical considerations, along with the fact that we had to design on the fly,” says Darren. “Lighting was a big issue. The few bits of dynamic lighting in there are quite expensive. The characters are built with a relatively low amount of polygons, which as well as helping technically, also gave them a look of fragility. We talked about the notion that people have many facets and angles, which contributed to this sort of look. It’s one that plays well in VR.”
4 MODELLING AND ANIMATION
“Assets were all built using Maya and Photoshop, plus Allegorithmic’s Substance Painter and Substance Designer,” says Dan. “In terms of animation, we implemented quite a basic character animation structure, as there simply wasn’t time to get into the nitty gritty. Budgetary restrictions also led us to mocap a lot of stuff. We used Perception Neuron to capture the animation in-house. Motionbuilder wasn’t used for this project, but it’s likely we’ll utilise it in future.”
5 BRINGING IT TO LIFE
“The engine we chose was Unity, mainly because of available skills here at Aardman,” explains Dan. “It’s simply easier to find C# coders rather than C++, which is required for Unreal. We then just worked with the Rift DK2 and profiler to run and test it.”