UbiArt

I love video games and I've been playing a lot of Rayman Origins recently. I've always been a fan of the Rayman game series but this particular game grabs me with a fantastic art style. This art style is not only unique for the Rayman series but for games in general. "Beautiful" does not even begin to describe the art, just see the trailer below:

I really wanted to learn how the art for the game was created and after some research I came across quite a surprise. Ubisoft, the company behind the Rayman series, actually developed a fantastic new art engine called UbiArt and used it for this game. The story behind UbiArt is even cooler, Ubisoft wanted to create an animation system that can be used with ANY visual source and they succeeded! UbiArt can work with anything from crayons and ink to clay and 3D renderings. The tool primarily works by letting animators import content with ease, add skeletons to their chosen medium, and easily animate by establishing poses the tool then processes into animations. A more technical description was found on the UbiArt blog:

"...we use 2D patches to contort sections of the image with a level of complexity that can adapt to the potential needs of the final rendering and the target machine. This technique adapts remarkably well to this type of animation and gives excellent performances in a real-time context."

These next two videos provide great explanations of the UbiArt tool. The first shows some Ubisoft staff collaborating and using UbiArt and the second video has a nice intro to what UbiArt is before cutting to the Rayman Origins game trailer show above.