On May 24, one of SIGGRAPH’s most high-profile events, the Computer Animation Festival (CAF), announced this year’s winners and released trailers for this year’s films at the Electronic Theater.
** Ruiyun Rendering ** brings you the production analysis of this year’s premiere/award-winning works of electronic Theater!
Weta Digital creative director/Visual Effects Director Keith Miller and veteran electronic artist Nathan Farquhar talk about the production process and difficulties of CAF’s Judges’ Choice award “Meerkat” (far right below).
(l To R) Premieres: Julian Tuwim: To Everyman; Blood Song: A Silent Ballad; Winner: “Migrants”; “I’m a Pebble”; Meerkat
Meanwhile, Epic Games has announced a system for rendering realistic hair and fur in real time. The official white paper “Making Real Time Realistic Hair” is also released **. Based on the fur and feathers in Meerkat and the human hair shown in the MetaHuman Creator video, it explores various hair treatment techniques in depth, including workflow, best practices, modeling and mapping techniques, etc.
SIGGRAPH 2021 CAF Premiere & Award winning entry
SIGGRAPH 2021 Electronic Theatre will feature 6 selected works, 14 student works, and 17 professional studio works for a total of 37. Among them, two short films have premiered worldwide:
Julian Tuwim: To Everyman
Country: Poland
Produced by Platige Image
CG Director: Cezary Albiński
The film is a manifesto to expose propaganda’s manipulation of the masses, such as the need to whitewash the war, and to make it widely accepted in society.
Blood Song: A Silent Ballad
Country: Thailand
Produced by Zati Studio
Producer/Director: Phanuthep Sutthithepthamrong
Adapted from Eric Drooker’s graphic novel and made using Unreal Engine, the film tells the story of an innocent girl whose life is drastically changed by war.
In order to present the visual effect of the original work, the director adopted the form of black and white silent film without any dialogue, and used the combination of choreography, light and shadow technology and music to convey emotion, which also ensured that audiences of any nationality and language groups could understand it.
The original
shooting
In order to achieve a more ideal effect, the shooting of the film was basically completed in the green screen, while the water scene was shot in the swimming pool with the blue screen.
Visual effects production
The visual effects of the film were made using Unreal Engine. UE could build high resolution scenes. After months of repeated experiments, the final results were very good.
In addition to the premieres, the show will also include three winners in the grand Prize categories.
Best in Show
Migrants
Country: France
School: Pole 3D
Directors: Hugo Caby, Antoine Dupriez, Aubin Kubiak, Lucas Lermytte, and Zoe Zoe
The film has won the student Award of the 19th VES Awards, the Best Student Work of SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Computer Animation Festival, and the Best Animated Short Film Award of the 11th China International New Media Short Film Festival. The film tells the story of the migration of two polar bears. Due to global warming, two polar bears are displaced to find a new habitat. On the way, they meet brown bears and try to live together with them.
The manuscript
Character display
Best Student Project
I’m a Pebble
Country: France
School: ESMA
Directed by Melanie Berteraut Platon, Yasmine Bresson, Leo Coulombier, Nicolas Grondin, Maxime Le Chapelain, Louise Masse
Bubble is a little otter who lives with three mossy stones and considers them part of her family. As she slowly realized the truth, she had to face her loneliness. The film is watercolor and pastel, and is actually MADE in 3D.
Make resolution
The manuscript
Character display
Jury’s Choice
Meerkat
Country: New Zealand
Produced by: Weta Digital
Creative Director/Visual Effects Director: Keith Miller
The project is a collaboration between Weta Digital and Epic Games, and aims to use Unreal Engine to create cinema-level animated shorts, helping unreal Engine optimize its real-time Strand-based hair production system in the process. The short film shows a meerkat wrestling with a fierce eagle, humorous story.
Meerkat production details
Weta Digital creative Director/Visual Effects Director Keith Miller (simply Keith) and veteran electronic artist Nathan Farquhar (simply Nathan) share the details of how Meerkat was made.
(left to right) Keith Miller, Nathan Farquhar
Weta Digital X Epic cooperation opportunity
Keith: A wire-based hair creation system has appeared in UE 4.24, and Weta Digital has been working closely with Epic Games since late 2019. Through the collaborative project Meerkat, Weta used her deep understanding of hair assets, such as how the hair changes under different lights, to help UE team adjust the hair production system to ensure that UE’s customized hair production system for Weta digital meets Weta’s high requirements for hair creature production.
preparation
Keith: The Weta digital team went to zoos to learn the details of meerkats’ fur.
Looking for reference
The storyboard
Meerkat hair making
Nathan: The modeler first draws the hair in the Yeti and then imports it into the UE. For meerkats to achieve movie-quality texture, they need to be very thick, with about 700,000 to 800,000 strands.
For hair to look real, the accuracy of the coloring is very important, and UE’s coloring system can see the results quickly and intuitively.
Keith: We tried to recreate some biological processes, such as the amount and timing of hair pigment release during exercise. These changes can be seen in real time in UE, so that we can better adjust the pigment release mechanism of the hair under movement, as well as the change of the whole pattern caused by the movement of each strand of hair. Using these hair changes to recreate real meerkats and eagles.
The animators also used **Maya and UE’s Live Link**, which are also very important to give the creators an idea of the visual effects of different animal poses and the basic condition of hair under different lights.
Traditional hair production requires baking and rendering before dynamic effects can be seen. In many cases, even if the result is not satisfactory, there is not enough time to modify it.
In this production, the animation director first attached gray material balls and observed the movements of the meerkats.
Add more hair and adjust the amount for the desired effect.
The making of fierce carved feathers
Nathan: Feathers are already a big challenge in traditional filmmaking. There are many difficulties in the anatomy, binding and hair density of feathers. Making feathers in ** * was more like a scientific experiment for us.
The solution we settled on was to make each feather heel a geometry rather than a card.
These geometry of feathers are then placed on a Skeletal meshes.
This way each stem becomes part of the binding, and UE can process the movement of each barb, ensuring that the feather can achieve a vivid effect in the movement.
We ended up with 3.7 million feathers, and of course more feathers were needed to get the perfect shape, but the result was amazing.
SIGGRAPH ASIA 2021
If you have wonderful work or innovative research and ideas, why not show them off on one of the world’s leading communication platforms in computer graphics and interactive technology?
The 14th SIGGRAPH ASIA conference, which will be held in Tokyo, Japan from December 14 to 17, 2021, is now inviting papers, courses, videos, 3D audio and other technology and art content related to computer graphics and interactive technology from around the world. Content categories and deadlines are shown below:
