

Valve's Source engine to power upcoming animated film - sew
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/steams-source-engine-to-power-upcoming-animated-film/

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TrevorJ
I'm interested to see how this pans out - the reality is, the lions share of
the costs for animated features have _nothing_ to do with rendering. I'm
concerned they are buying the worst of both worlds with this approach: they
still have to create good looking art assets, they still need to animated them
well, but they are further constrained by the confines of what they can do in
a realtime engine, with a toolchain that is not optimized for this type of
work.

I _do think_ that there is a ton to be gained from tightly coupled previs
pipelines that don't incur rendering overhead. Ideally the artists should be
able to see what they are working on in a form that is as close to the final
render as possible, but without the wait. Systems that can offer this with low
overhead cut down on the amount of time the artists need to get the results
they want tremendously, especially in situations where your team isn't big
enough to have modeling, texturing, animation, fx and lighting departments
that are completely siloed.

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berkut
That's not quite true - render time still is very important, even for the
biggest studios like ILM/SPI/Dreamworks with the biggest renderfarms.

However, yeah, artist time is more costly, and recently GI pathtracing
raytracers have made huge inroads in the VFX industry due to the fact that
lookdev/lighting configuration is much quicker for the artists due to being
physically-based, so you get very realistic lighting without faking it with AO
or virtual lights.

It definitely speeds the iterative process up when the artists can see how the
scenes looks on their workstation without kicking it off to the renderfarm and
waiting 4 hours for a render to come back.

With Arnold or VRay, it's possible to get a very fast 3/4-bounce GI solution
with heavy geometry and textures in a matter of minutes.

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TrevorJ
You have a point, however in regards to render times I was more speaking to
films in this budget range. Big studios have custom toolchains, and do
everything in-house, rendering included. If you are using non-proprietary 3D
software, there are rendering services at your disposal that are often pretty
reasonably priced.

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james4k
This seems relevant:
<https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Filmmaker>

In short, Source Filmmaker was a never officially released tool that was used
as part of the production of the TF2 and L4D promotional videos. It provided
tools for recording footage, basic editing, and advanced rendering that went
beyond the engine's realtime capabilities.

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TazeTSchnitzel
I remember than some people have got an old, buggy version of it from an old
TF2 Beta.

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pkaler
I built the MovieMaker tool for the original Company of Heroes. The key goals
were to seamlessly blend cinematics with gameplay and to reuse assets that
were already created for the game.

I haven't used Source Filmmaker but I wouldn't recommend using the MovieMaker
tool for actual films. The use case is completely different.

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aero142
I just want to say congratz on being part of making a great game. The opening
level with the Normandy landing where the cinematics led into the level was
amazing. I remember feeling terrible giving the orders for the soldiers to
move out of cover to take the machine gun nests knowing that half of them
would die in order to advance. It was both disturbing and awe inspiring at the
same time. A pretty amazing game.

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trotsky
_Valve has a working relationship with production studio Brown Bag Films,
according to Kotaku, and agreed to license the engine for Deep._

I'm curious if you actually need a license to use an engine in a film.
Presuming you produce all your own assets and otherwise have an appropriate
license for the engine to render it once, is there any precedent for requiring
a license to perform it as well? I'm assuming you don't need a performance
license for NLE software like premiere or vegas?

~~~
forgotusername
Note "working relationship" rather than "license": the obvious advantage of
building a movie in a game engine is that you could quite possibly very
quickly commercialize a game based on the movie if it turns out to be a
success.

And with that thought I felt my third eye open just a crack, revealing a
vision of how movie/game franchises of the future might be funded and
marketed. :) Interesting stuff, or at least, in a few years it might be.

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comex
The quote includes the phrase "agreed to license" :p

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gcr
Source is a pain to work with for animation. Just ask this guy:
<http://accursedfarms.com>

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Nican
A pretty good unkown movie using Eve Online and the Source Film Maker is Clear
Skies, the Movie: <http://www.clearskiesthemovie.com/>

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fufulabs
Why didn't they go with Unity which is much much cheaper?

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xsmasher
A pro studio will go for the best tool (with cost considered as a factor) not
the cheapest tool. It doesn't pay to cheap out on tools, especially if it
leads to extra labor costs because of bad workflow, etc.

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freehunter
Plus all other factors aside, you have to imagine there's some name
recognition involved. Valve and Source are big brands, and could draw in a
curious audience if only for the novelty.

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planetguy
Fifteen million euros for machinima? Where is the money going?

I can see how Source would be a good way to make a reasonable-looking animated
movie on the cheap. But with a reasonable amount of money to spend, then
either:

a) You're reusing enough existing stuff (character models, physics enginey
stuff, et cetera) that you can't possibly spend that much money, or

b) You're re-doing enough stuff from scratch that there doesn't seem to be
much advantage to doing it in Source rather than something more conventional
like Maya [or whatever they're using nowadays]

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alexhawket
For a typical pixar/dreamworks movie, it takes about $1.25 million/per minute
of film.

It can take a week just do 3 seconds of animation and all the labour is, of
course, exceptionally talented and extremely expensive.

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dannytatom
"For a typical pixar/dreamworks movie, it takes about $1.25 million/per minute
of film."

Not doubting you, but do you have a source for this?

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alexhawket
A friend of mine works in film, so I know the ballpark costs from
conversations with him. You can find production costs for films on the net
fairly easily.

Puss in Boots, for example was $130 million and Kung Fu Panda 2 was around
$150 million. So you're looking at 1.25m to 1.5m per minute.

