Zafari: Using Unreal Engine for broadcast TV

littleclaude

Zafari: Tapping into Unreal Engine for Episodic Animation | Project Spotlight | Unreal Engine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfqj3CFZyxU&feature=youtu.be

oglu

and here a PDF with more info...
https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/Unreal+Engine/Why-Real-Time-Technology-is-the-Future-of-Film-and-Television-Production-ecc14547ab8a340d4c00e2f931adfcf3a201478d.pdf

RN

A cinematic character may have a very advanced rig with lattice\cage deformers, plus custom drivers\set-driven-keys with complex expressions, things that the game engine isn't likely to support (beyond the standard skinning and morphing).

So one thing that people have done to be able to use a real-time renderer for this kind of work is to animate in Maya or whatever, with the complex rigs that you need, and then use Alembic (a file format) to bake all that complex animation into static meshes that are streamed per frame into the game engine.

It's been done in Unity with a custom plugin, and Unreal seems to have it as well.

RyanB

We use Unity to create user acquisition ads.  We render frames in Unity in near real-time.

RN said:

A cinematic character may have a very advanced rig with lattice\cage deformers, plus custom drivers\set-driven-keys with complex expressions, things that the game engine isn't likely to support (beyond the standard skinning and morphing).

So one thing that people have done to be able to use a real-time renderer for this kind of work is to animate in Maya or whatever, with the complex rigs that you need, and then use Alembic (a file format) to bake all that complex animation into static meshes that are streamed per frame into the game engine.

It's been done in Unity with a custom plugin, and Unreal seems to have it as well.

We had some characters with some extremely complicated face rigs in Maya.  I wrote a Python script that converted the head into a blendshape on each frame.  I saved all of the keys for the blendshapes into a JSON file.  Then we exported the character into Unity and a C# script I wrote read the JSON file and set up the head with all of the keys for the blendshapes in the correct places.  I wish I could show some samples because it looked incredibly smooth.