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Part 2

It's art : Can you speak about your pipeline?

RTUK : We start with a written treatment which is then developed into traditional storyboard panels.  These are scanned and edited into a 2D animatic to give a rough indication of pacing and length.  From the 2D animatic we create a 3D blockout. Individual key frames are identified within each scene of the Blockout and Animatic to be worked up into 2D concept art in Photoshop. Props, vehicles, characters and environments are poly-modelled in 3DS Max or sculpted in Z Brush, they’re then unwrapped in Max or Headus UV layout before being textured in Photoshop by our art department. Most large environments are a mix of traditional 3D models, low-resolution camera mapped geometry and matte painting. We often use a point cache pipeline for character animation. Particle effects are created in Particle Flow with smoke and explosions rendered with Afterburn. We currently work in a linear workflow using Vray as our primary renderer. Adobe AfterEffects is out main compositing package and all our high-def projects are edited in Adobe Premiere using our Matrox Axio suite.

I.A. - What are the soft wares you use in most of your production?

RTUK - We primarily use 3DS Max, ZBrush, V-Ray & Afterburn, AfterEffects, Photoshop, but we're happy to plug other tools into our pipeline if the project will benefit.



I.A. - Can we have more details about your latest production Stormbirds?

RTUK - Stormbirds was one of the most enjoyable. Building planes and blowing stuff up made a few of the guys purr with delight! I think the great thing with this one was it engaged on so many levels - the pre-vis was inspiring, the modellers were in their element, the environment guys loved the backgrounds, the animators got to create some cool moves, and there's a nuke explosion thrown in for good measure! What more could we ask for?

We probably had our strongest pre-vis so far on this one, the client had some really nice game design concepts and we just picked the killer frames and developed them further.

I.A. - There is a lot of natural background and vegetation in this, have you worked with Vue Xstream or other tools?

RTUK - The rainforest scene was created with a mixture of VUE, camera mapping and matte's. None of the other environments used VUE, they were all modelled in 3DS Max and either texture mapped traditionally or camera mapped.

We had an issue at the time getting a velocity pass out of VUE, so for the forest environments they were rendered out as flat footage from within VUE, with no motion blur. They were then placed in the background of Max with a transparent version of the exported mesh from VUE over the top. This then enabled us to use the velocity pixel data of the transparent geometry to image blur the render behind. It worked pretty well, and made sure the plane and background had the same blur. Everything else that was modelled was done in 3DS Max, UV's were done in UVLayout, Texturing in Photoshop, Particles in AfterBurn, Rendering in VRay, Post work in After Effects, Edit in Premiere.