For the "Virtual Film Industry" established in 2019, its idea of entering the virtual track is: relying on its own accumulation in the field of 3D original animation, so that virtual people have a more suitable "acting" appearance, a more plump "acting", a more suitable dubbing, and complete the transformation from virtual people to virtual actors.
The author | Huang Zezheng Xiao Chao
This is the fifth article in the New Sound Pro "Between Virtual and Real" series
Metahuman, which continues to explode under the concept of metaversity, needs to find more practical application scenarios.
Since 2021, the most intuitive feeling is that the virtual person market is becoming more and more hot, and the number of entrants is increasing. These new entrants hope to quickly and accurately locate their own virtual people in the booming virtual person market.
Such as AYAYI launched by Burning Wheat Technology, Hua Zhibing, a virtual student developed by the Xiaoice team, Xiao Zheng, a digital astronaut created by the Second World Culture and Xinhua News Agency, ASK, a virtual male model under iQIYI Deyang Studio, and ALiCE, a virtual singer created by GLA Grand Moyi, and so on.
These different avatars have their own specific occupations, including models, singers, students, and so on. This means that the traditional business logic of "technology spawns content, content looks for scenarios" seems to be equally applicable in the emerging virtual human market.
For the virtual film industry established in 2019, its idea of entering the virtual track is: relying on its own accumulation in the field of 3D original animation, so that virtual people have a more suitable appearance for acting, a fuller "acting", a more suitable dubbing, and complete the transformation from virtual people to virtual actors.
For virtual artists, Wang Ran, founder of EKai Capital, once summed up: "Compared with real artists, digital artists have many advantages in terms of safety, controllability and time flexibility. Although the replacement of live artists by digital artists will not occur on a large scale in the short term, in the long run, it will certainly become a trend for digital artists to play an increasingly important role in film and television works."
He Zijing, co-founder and CEO of Virtual Pictures, said that Virtual Pictures tried to launch virtual actors, on the one hand, it was aware of the increasing demand for virtual actors in the market, on the other hand, it was also determined by the team's genes.
Virtual Crane Chase
Since 2009, the core team of Virtual Pictures has entered the animation industry and established the Virtual Impression Animation Studio under the leadership of founder Liu Huai. Early works include Fan works such as "Warriors of the League" and "Cheerla Demacia". By 2013, the predecessor of the virtual film industry, Super God Pictures, was established, and the team opened the road of originality, successively launching works such as "Super God Academy" and "XiongBing Company", accumulating rich experience in animation project production.
He Zijing revealed that the team's idea of making virtual actors dates back to 2015. At that time, the team believed that because the production cycle of animation projects was mostly more than one year, even if a single character became a hit, if the empty window period before the sequel was launched was too long, it would be difficult to maintain audience stickiness.
And if the popular characters such as Rena in the drama are made into virtual stars alone, it can not only extend the life cycle of the role, but also fill the gap in the rest period of the drama, so that the role can also be familiar when the drama is not updated.
However, due to the immature market environment at that time, the accumulation of technology was not fully formed, and finally shelved until the establishment of the virtual film industry in 2019, the virtual team finally had the opportunity to realize the beautiful idea.
In terms of entry time, the virtual film industry obviously does not have an advantage. In addition to the veteran head virtual idols Hatsune Mirai and Luo Tianyi, a number of emerging virtual human forces such as AYAYI, Ah Xi, Ling Ling, Liu Yexi, and Cui Xiaopan have also appeared.
In this regard, the solution idea of virtual film is to focus on the actor attributes of virtual actors, starting from aspects such as appearance, expression, costume, dubbing, etc., and cooperate with the high-quality script created by director Salare to create a group of virtual actors who really "have acting skills and can act".
Ji Lanxi
First, in terms of production tools, the virtual studios team has undergone a series of transitions from 3DMax to MAYA (Autodesk's famous 3D modeling and animation software) to UE4( a game development engine from Epic Games). According to He Zijing, "The team's main consideration is the presentation of the character details and the effect of real-time rendering."
The three iterations of the first virtual actor under the virtual film industry, "Virtual Crane Chase", profoundly reflect the progress of the modeling level of the virtual team.
According to "New Voice Pro", the original model of the virtual crane chase comes from Rena in "Super Seminary" in 2013, when the character's clothing, hair, skin and other details were still relatively rough.
Later, in the "Male Soldier Company" period in 2017, thanks to the rendering ability of MAYA software to present the details of the characters, Rena's skin texture and model accuracy have been significantly improved. By the time of the latest series, the team rendered in real time through the Unreal Engine 4 engine, which has been able to achieve more grand scenes and more realistic character models.
The second is the model asset library established by the virtual team in the long-term 3D original animation production, which plays an important role in creating and polishing new characters.
He Zijing said that when producing the drama, the team has built D-level characters to S-level characters. Therefore, when introducing virtual actors, the team will have similar models to refer to or modify. Whether it is to help B-end customers complete the virtual person production business, or focus on their own development, compared with zero to one, it will be easier to upgrade on the existing basis than from zero to one.
On the other hand, in addition to the accumulated model asset pool, the virtual team also needs to constantly add new variables to make the virtual actor more suitable for "acting".
Before creating a virtual actor, the virtual team will conduct a lot of market research, screen out some beautiful faces that are in line with the public's aesthetic, and determine a rough outline and frame. After that, according to the personality of the character set in the play, match the corresponding facial features.
He Zijing used the image of a tough guy as an example: "For example, the thick eyebrows, big eyes, high nose bridge, and lip features of tough guy actors are symbolic symbols and are in line with the actor's 'human design'." The practice of the virtual team is to first determine the tough guy setting of the virtual actor, and then look for some representative star pictures, refer to the contour characteristics of their facial features, and carry out independent face pinch creation.
It is worth noting that compared with the simple imitation of star faces, the effect that the virtual film industry hopes to create is its own design beauty, reaching the state of a thousand faces. In this regard, He Zijing said that on the one hand, in order to avoid the risk of copyright, on the other hand, the team entered the virtual person market, not to rub the heat, "but really want to build their own digital assets."
But at the same time, in order to create a virtual actor with thousands of faces, and at the same time conform to the character setting, there are different difficulties in modeling, animation, rendering and so on.
For example, another virtual actor under the virtual film industry, "Box", his character positioning is a very avant-garde, fashionable "Cool Girl". Therefore, the box needs to reflect many trendy wearing elements, including a large number of trivial details, such as clothing materials, styles, colors, piercing styles of belts, coat hot stamping, ways to tie shoelaces, etc., which need to be polished and deliberated by the virtual team.
According to "New Voice Pro", in order to select a costume that fits the "box" Cool Girl personality, the virtual team sometimes needs to draw hundreds of sketches. Ho said: "Characters with a stronger sense of design such as boxes will indeed be more difficult to grasp. Because she needs to add some imaginative parts to the existing framework."
For this reason, the virtual team needs to spend a lot of time and repeated multiple versions to finalize the original painting style, and then make different color selections accordingly. Entering the modeling stage, the pre-project team of Virtual Pictures will meet and discuss non-stop in this link until the initial version is finalized.
At the critical stage of presentation, in order to make the virtual actors more vivid and more acting, the virtual team still needs to carry out a lot of meticulous work.
Taking the presentation of specific facial expressions as an example, the virtual crane chase will have dimples on the face when smiling, and some characters will have Sichuan character lines on their foreheads when they are sad, these subtle emojis allow the virtual actors to have a richer expression of emotions, and also help to promote the development of the plot.
In order to achieve good performance results, the virtual team greatly expanded its virtual emoji library. According to He Zijing, "The basic emoji library has only 51 expressions, which can basically achieve full emotional coverage, while the virtual film industry has achieved more than 260 expressions." This means that through face binding and facial recognition technology, the actors under the virtual team can make more and more subtle expressions to meet the needs of acting.
In terms of 3D engine rendering, in general, the more faces there are, the more detailed the 3D model is rendered. According to He Zijing, the current number of 3D model pieces of the virtual team can reach more than 1 million faces. As a reference, in a single game scenario, the number of 3D model pieces usually requires tens of thousands of faces. That is to say, the virtual actors under the virtual film industry have reached a certain level of sophistication.
In addition to the visual presentation effect of virtual actors, their dubbing effects are also the focus of virtual films. According to "New Voice Pro", the name of the virtual crane chase comes from its exclusive voice actor Yun Hechai.
He Zijing believes that as a virtual actor, while having a beautiful appearance, he should also be able to express the emotions of the characters in the play through sound to present a fuller role effect. "Sound is also an important part of an actor's acting skills."
To this end, when shaping key virtual actors, the virtual team will generally choose to cooperate with the industry's well-known CV to ensure that the character's anger, sadness, joy and other emotions can be more accurately restored.
Within the virtual team, another co-founder director V7 (Wei Qi), a dubbing professional, has many years of dubbing experience, and has formed some unique insights in the field of dubbing. Before starting a project, V7 directors record their own pre-sound to provide a template for voice actors. In the specific dubbing process, the team will carry out a variety of dubbing attempts according to the director's requirements, including laughter, shouting, crying and other sounds.
After creating virtual actors that audiences can "see and hear", the operation of virtual pictures for its "artists" is also unfolding at the same time.
According to He Zijing, virtual film has carried out long-term work planning for virtual actors. For example, the virtual crane chase has participated in many works such as "Blue Network Upgrade Plan", "Counterattack Space", "Mountain and Sea Association" and so on. On the other hand, in addition to showing his face in the drama, the virtual crane chase will also release production tidbits on various platforms to show the daily side of the virtual actors.
According to the official data released by Virtual Pictures, the number of fans of Virtual Crane Chase in Douyin is 210,000, and the exposure volume exceeds 20 million; the number of fans on Station B reaches 60,000, and the number of exposure exceeds 1.5 million; and the number of Weibo fans is 100,000, and the number of exposure is more than 40,000. The core fan age group is concentrated in 14-23 years old.
In terms of joint brand activities, B-end users such as Virtual Crane Chase and Lenovo have carried out joint cooperation such as tablet themes and mooncake gift boxes, and have also launched linkages with LNG teams in the S11 season of League of Legends.
Overall, the current main business model of virtual film is still traditional: content output + fan operation + traffic monetization. In this regard, He Zijing frankly said: "The team gene of the virtual film industry to do content determines that it is difficult for the company to take the road of strong marketing and strong operation."
In the early days, there were differences between the production team and the operation team in response to the operation mode of virtual crane chase, which led to the instability of its content output on various platforms, which once affected the maintenance of existing fans and the expansion of new fans.
After a period of running-in, Virtual Pictures finally decided that its "virtual actors" should still develop at their own pace, that is, focus on interpreting content.
He Zijing said that unlike Lingna Belle, she can complete the monetization in the form of copyright and peripherals through short-term IP marketing. For virtual actors who have not yet accumulated stable fans, it will be a more secure and more appropriate plan to stably expose them in simple scenes such as live broadcasts and short videos, and then adjust the follow-up content according to the fan portraits and complete the monetization.
In other words, what the virtual film industry hopes to create is a group of "powerful actors" with content and understanding of expression.