Cartoons are being made using game engines

Made in UE4.

So what are the advantages and disadvantages of making animated movies using game engines vs conventional 3D apps ?

Bloody have to import all bloody animations.

Game engines have come a long way but the main disadvantage at least with UE4 is the prep that goes into it. It’s not an all in one process where you animate then render your stuff. You have to create your animations and models in another package then import them into UE4 then do all the cinematic work inside of UE4 using their tools (Matinee) and possibly setup materials lights etc as well. So it becomes a multistep process. There is also more planning involved. Not really all the big of an issue since it mirrors in a lot of ways the way movies used to be/are done with something like Renderman. It’s just not as straightforward as things are in an all-in-one dcc package.

Once Blender gets its realtime viewport renderer, one could possibly make cartoons without all of the importing and all of the other steps involved (the only real difference is the method of rendering).

Game engines though could possibly have an advantage where you can ‘play’ the episode using keyboard controls or a controller to direct the actions, but that assumes you do the right commands at the right times to get the right feel.

Several things come to mind as advantages of using UE4, for example, instead of Blender. Better animation tools - for blending and layering anims (assuming the rig was properly setup and exported to FBX without any issues; or maybe I haven’t worked with anims for animated movies and don’t know wonders Blender can do :slight_smile: ); real-time rendering with expected results (although limited choice of “looks” because if that); real-time 3D audio mixing (Blender might have that, but I’ve never see anyone using it); more advanced particles/physics; VR-ready; can be interactive.

Agree on the amount of double work involved - making all in 2D/3D and then converting assets to engine’s format and additionally setting it up in UE4.

Other than probably superior graphics with UE4, how does Matinee stack up against Source Filmmaker? I’ve never fiddled with either.

The advantages of real time 3D are enormous, mostly because of making the creation process more dynamic and interactive. Also another advantage is that you won’t count rendering effort at all, this reduces the production costs dramatically.

The main disadvantage is that you loose the benefits of advanced imagery in terms of rendering and physics complexity. However this is a balance (quality vs speed) that each production manager has to evaluate. There might be a few tricks to make semi-realtime or hybrid animations according to the exact requirements but that’s another story.

Other than that I bet all of my money on real time movie making for the future. I am happy to see that Blender Foundation flirts with this idea and I am very positive about the future of real time 3D viewport.

There are major examples that I personally like.

One is how Lucas Arts can use real time graphics to preview the movie. This visualization is very accurate to the final rendered result and this feedback is very precious for the lighting department.

Another example is this Luminous engine by Square Enix, imagine going into this tunnel with full of zombies…

I guess that in only just 5 years movie making will change forever. Everybody will use the real time renderer for their common usage.

SFM has a full blown graph editor, it’s pretty good and really fun to use, really fast too. It’s still in beta and really buggy though :frowning:

Haven’t played with Source Filmmaker. Matinee is pretty good. It’s always being worked on the devs but it’s actually pretty impressive.

I think in-app real time renderer such as FurryBall is more cost effective, perhaps?

http://furryball.aaa-studio.eu/

Blizzard apparently uses it for HeartStone intro, if I get the fact right.

An advantage could be that game engines dont do real rendering in the quality Blender does.
Its based upon game realism, so that can work faster thats more opengl like. or directX.
Its faster but less realistic.

Is it any faster than Cycles ? Is there a solid add-on to connect Blender and Furry Ball ?

Realtime rendering for 3d film has the main advantage of speed,
and real time interaction as Ace suggested.

Imagine using a force feedback rig on a walking ragdoll actor (programmed/engineered to only be able to exert like 5 pounds of force?)

something like this ->

but with the action armatures IK targets to be replaced with the actors real world pieces coordinates/rotations

This system uses actions , but also uses realtime mouse input…

realtime Leap data or 3d mouse data or kinect data could be used as well.

Seen some crazy garrys mod movies!

red vs blue.

One disadvantage for real time rendering is the hardware requirement for your audience. Everyone can play a video, but not everyone has the hardware necessary to push UE4 at a fluid frame rate.

UE4 can run on smartphones, so I am sure if you bake lighting, it will run on any DX10 GPU. Also you can capture video and let people who can’t run UE4 watch it.

Last I saw on their forum, the current ideology is expecting that people get one of the best machines money can buy if they want fluid framerates, a responsive workflow, and good looking graphics when using the engine (amid reports that there’s not much effort to polish any of the settings that doesn’t say “Epic”). There really is kind of an elitist and fanboyish culture that has been developing there.

Of course, rendered to video this isn’t such a big deal, but it does produce a potentially major hardware cost barrier to those who want to try their skills at producing something.

Huh? My PC is 9 years old and it runs the engine fine if I don’t go crazy with settings and real-time GI and all that goodness. Decent PC will do for UE4, same as for Blender. Plus, that’s only needed to use Editor. To run release (standalone game) you don’t need powerful PC.

Every single engine/app has fanboys (don’t need to go far from this forum :wink: ). Epic devs are very responsive and add features fix bugs promptly. For example, CryEngine, Unity and Source devs are usually nowhere to be found.

If all you care about is the speed of rendering (or lack of rendering altogether) and you think that Unreal engine looks better than Cycles, you should definitely not be using Cycles at all. In fact, you probably don’t even need to be using Blender at all. Programs like Source Filmmaker Unreal and Unity either have full animation environments or plugins that can at least do the same thing. I would just build my assets in Blender, import them, and animate away.

I’ve seen a lot of people talking about real-time this and that lately. Personally, it just looks like a video game to me. Even what people point out to me as being the best of the very best does very little for me. For my taste, I want feature film quality rendering and nothing else will work for me. I hate it when things look CG. My favorite is when it looks like real-world materials and lighting but you know that it couldn’t be real. I love it when cartoon characters are rendered so that they look like they are made out of real-world materials. So, it completely floors me when I see people saying that Unreal produces image that look just as good as/better than production renderers.

But… It all depends on what you are going for really. I understand that. But, I wouldn’t say I’m happy about it. I’ve work the better part of 20 years waiting for render technology to get to where it is today. I hate seeing people say that game engines are making production rendering obsolete or that it’s all going that way in the future. It wouldn’t be so bad if they said that it’s not there yet but that it’s getting there. But the fact that there are so many people who think Unreal actually looks better then say, Cycles or Vray… That worries me the most. Because it signals that the average person doesn’t care about the subtleties of lighting and shading like I do and that all my work to produce believably realistic imagery is for nothing.

But of course, that’s only half true. While it’s true that game engines are getting better and better looking, it’s also true that production rendering is getting faster and faster. So, the logical conclusion is that the two are actually going to meet at some point in-between in the future. not that one will overtake the other. So, in other words, Real-time path tracing with GI, volumetrics, physically correct lighting, shading and optics are going to be the future. Basically Cycles but in 60 FPS. That’s going to be the future. What we do with the technology; whether it’s games, interactive visualizations, or interactive story telling, is up to us. Eventually, we will have these tools and we will be the ones deciding what the future of entertainment will be.