Pixar-veteranen Mark Andrews förklarar hur Unreal Engine banar väg för animerad film

Unreal Engine är naturligtvis ett välkänt namn i spelvärlden och är alltså är verktyget bakom många av de senaste och mest avancerade spelen. Men det är också en betydligt mer mångsidig mjukvara som kan användas i andra medier, till exempel inom filmanimation.

I samband med vår bevakning av San Diego Comic Con Malaga pratade vi med Pixar-veteranen och animationsexperten Mark Andrews för att höra hur Unreal Engine förändrar landskapet för filmproduktion. Andrews sade:

"Unreal Engine is such a fantastic tool because it's just a renderer that renders in real time. I don't have to spend a week waiting for my shot to render. What that allows us to do, in coordination with using mocap, is I don't need the big, cumbersome, gigantic crews that it takes to do an animated film, where you really have to plan because it's so expensive and you're going to get everybody involved. As it goes down, these productions are tried-and-true 30-year-old production styles. Now we don't have to adhere to them anymore. We can have smaller crews working faster. Unreal helps make that happen."

Han förklarar vidare att Unreal Engine gör det möjligt för skapare att snabbare justera sina projekt och arbeta mer spontant - på ett sätt som påminner om spelfilmsproduktion:

"All the projects I'm working on right now, the problem with animation is that to get any kind of organicness into something that's very mechanical and computery is incredibly hard. We have to plan that. But being on a mocap stage with a virtual camera, now I can work with the actors. I can explore the scene. I can workshop the moment. If it's not working, I know it's not working right there and I can rewrite on the stage. There's much more of this improvisational, organic, back-and-forth creativity.

And we can find stuff and you can record all of it, so you're keeping everything. And then when I go back in, now I can shoot it, or my layout team can go in and shoot it, and now they can shoot coverage. You don't have coverage in animation. And so the story now, we have this process, this pipeline now, that lets us act more like live-action. So you get the best of live-action in that organicness and finding stuff in the serendipity, the happy accidents, plus the total control of your visual image from animation, colliding in the best possible way."

Andrews har använt Unreal Engine för att skapa sitt senaste projekt, en serie med titeln Super Giant Robot Brothers. Han berättar att mjukvaran hjälpte till att hålla produktionskostnaderna betydligt lägre än vid traditionell animation, och att den kan bana väg för en ny era av oberoende animerad filmproduktion

"The Supergiant Robot Brothers was able to get made and we used Unreal to do it. It was a miracle. All the planets were aligned and we were laser-focused. So we did five hours of content in 18 months for $13 million. So when I came out of that experience, I'm going, wait a minute, if you gave me $13 million and I only had 90 minutes, I can do that in 18 months and all that extra money will go to the look of the film. So that's when it dawned on me, the era of the independent animated film is here, using these real-time pipelines."

Se hela intervjun med Andrews nedan för mer om hans arbete med Brave och Meridas vilda hår, samt The Incredibles.