'Unbroken' VFX & Rotoscoping with Hybride

In the Angelina Jolie film, Hybride, a division of Ubisoft, takes the concept of VFX and rotoscoping to a whole new level. Given the complexity of recreation the Berlin Olympic Stadium as a virtual replica, Hybride needed to match the accurracy of the crowd in each of the 50 actions shot. But unlike the average CG crowd, Hybride needed to construct a tool that would allow the added flexibility required for the film's completion.

Considering the stadium’s size and numerous camera movements showcased throughout the film, the technique for creating the magnanimous CG crowd varied according to each camera point of view. On top of the varying camera movements, the size of the environment made it impossible to use a green-screen for most of the live actions scenes. As a result, the foreground plates had to be rotoscoped and integrated over the CG backgrounds. Hybride's technique allowed for greater freedom and speed for the camera operators when shooting action scenes from the foreground camera perspective. According to the director of photography, Roger Deakins, the main goal was to to always have the effects shows fit perfectly into pristine composted and lit shows to make up the live-motion portion of the film. The greatest amount of accuracy was required in the tracking and layout work in order to actively blend the CG elements to the rest of the camera shots. As a result of the crew's strong production ability, the production was produced with the highest quality possible.

The Revolution That Mattered

So some of you may know that Assassin's Creed 3, the next game from the titled series, will be coming out this month. It will feature half-English and half-Native American character Connor Kenway, an ancestor of the series' main protagonist Desmond Miles, and is set in Colonial America before, during, and after the revolutionary war where the story brings up the fact that maybe America wasn't fighting for freedom from the British but actually from Templar influence.

The reason why I want to talk about this upcoming release that has been buzzing around the video gaming world is because the marketing behind it's release is fantastic. Seriously, I've heard people get giddy over the trailers alone without ever seeing a second of gameplay. This is the Ubisoft's, the developer and producer, biggest marketing commitment in company history and even built this game to be able to be a standalone game for new people to the series. The company has even stated that in the first three weeks you could pre-order this game, they already surpassed the total pre-orders for the past two games, and the company allowed people to begin pre-ordering 7 months before the release which means that those numbers must really be staggering.

Attached below is one of the numerous videos from the marketing campaign that features a portrait of the Boston Tea Party that the camera flies into to see multiple different things from different angles, turning the 2D painting into a 3D world in itself. This choice really allows the people interested to get more flavor of the game while being submerged in the detail of the world before they could actually play and it is grand. A game that can express its story and setting using only smooth 3D animation instead of quick cuts of gameplay is really interesting and I look forward to not just playing this game when it is released but also watching more videos like this.



Assassin's Creed 3 is set to be released on October 31 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and Windows PC.

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.