Wlyder: Production Diary 03

It’s previz time!

Now we have the story beats laid down by the animatic, it’s time to move onto the previz directly in Unreal. This process uses boxes and cylinders to represent characters and sets and allows us to create the cameras which will go through to final animation. 

It may look a little bizarre, but these levitating tubes help us block out the action and decide on how best to capture this with cameras. It’s also a stage where we can drill down more into transitions and elements such as montages. The team will now come together to chat through and make some of these important decisions. 

It also allows for us to set the scale for the world. The Dad we decided is 170cm tall, then you can just block out rooms and buildings from there, so just eyeballing a table being 3.5 dads wide, give or take. 

Meanwhile Dad himself is readying completion (still a bit of noodling to be done on the hair and rig), meaning that he will be brought into the 3D scenes soon, replacing some of those cylinders. By creating the previz in Unreal, it means we can piece by piece replace characters, props and environments around the core edit. 

On the other assets, we dug out the Tilt Brush tools again, below you can see Mike painting a sunflower in 3D! It’s such a satisfying tool, even if it is slightly nausea-inducing. 

After all of this, he still decided he preferred the look of the modeled asset better, but if you never try you never know. We are however, using Tilt Brush to create some of the finer foliage such as grass and pine tree needles. 

We’ve also been looking into another post effect made available by 3Dnchu here, that is super cool. This hatching post-process creates a pencil drawn effect on materials, which is really beautiful and perfect for the style we are trying to create. We’ve been experimenting with bringing this into the final composition, and even when only subtle it helps add that extra something special. We believe that it’s the sum of all these small details that really pushes the final result. 

This is all part of the continuing look development process, which we find Unreal really excels at. Creating in real time not only allows us to be more efficient, but that in itself makes for more hands-on creativity. 

Next week we’ll be able to share with you some of the characters. Then we can start to look ahead and plan in the animation production. The action of this short will be simple, so there’s not a huge amount of realistic animation to get through, the focus being on subtle performance from the characters.