The FBEC2023 Future Business Ecological Link Conference and the 8th Golden Gyro Award were held on December 8, 2023 on the 6th floor of the Sheraton Shenzhen Futian Greater China Hotel.
With the theme of "Synergy and Symbiosis, Resilience Goes Far", and from the perspective of "Voyager" with forward-looking insight into the industry, the ice-breaking journey is the main line, focusing on AI, Metaverse, XR, games, e-sports, digital economy and other cutting-edge fields of technology and the Internet, presenting cutting-edge achievements in science and technology in an all-round way, focusing on hot topics of the times and business, discussing the future value of new technology, new business and new models, and going to the ice-breaking journey in the new winter of drama change with real braves!
FBEC2023 Main Venue A: Seeking Breakthroughs and Seeking Growth - 2023 Global Game Market Changes and Trends Forum invited Shao Lei, a technical art expert from Tencent Photonics Art Center, to give a wonderful speech on the theme of "Exploration of the Industrial Pipeline of Game Animation Production". Shao Lei believes that as the exploration of the industrial pipeline of game animation production becomes more and more mature, the R&D team can spend more time and energy on the design and quality of the gameplay, as well as polishing, so that in the near future, China's game R&D products can be more recognized internationally and achieve greater success.
The following is a transcript of the speech:
Distinguished guests, good morning. I'm Shao Lei from Tencent Photon Studio, and the topic I shared today is "Exploration of the Industrial Pipeline of Game Animation Production".
First of all, I would like to give a brief introduction, I am from the technical art group of the art design center of the photon studio group, and I have participated in "Peace Elite", "High Energy Hero", "Under the Inhuman", etc., and my personal experience has ranged from the earliest animation TD to the whole process of technical art and technical art focusing on the field of animation.
Why do we need to industrialize animation production? In fact, when many R&D companies open a new project, we will face several problems:
- Can the current animation quality support new gameplay?
- Will the existing animation workflow support the creation of a new game?
- Are there any different production Xi for the animation team you assembled?
- Is the development cost of the animation business over budget?
In response to these problems, we set our industrialization goals around the theme of reducing costs and increasing efficiency. To summarize briefly, we can reduce costs and increase efficiency through several dimensions: one is to improve quality, improve efficiency, and unify the R&D environment of art;
Photon is also exploring some technical solutions internally. At present, our team is divided into three main businesses:
First, the TA of motion capture is responsible for the tracking of the motion capture process and the support of motion capture software and hardware;
Second, RiggingTA is responsible for the development and development of game character binding, technology research and development, tool development, and package game physics solutions;
The third is technical animation, they have rich experience in animation production, and are responsible for the development and maintenance of dynamic state machines, the development and implementation of new engine animation technologies, and the development and support of game 3C.
In the past two years, we have developed the animation tool pipeline LSR, positioned as a comprehensive solution for a high-quality animation production pipeline, and currently our solution has been used in "Peace Elite", "PUGB Mobile" and some newly developed projects, this solution has a modular binding system, including the character design shown in the picture, you can split the various parts of the human body, and different components are like inserting Lego, assembled into snakes, cars, etc. The pipeline also has a rich animation toolchain, like the one shown in the bottom right corner of the screen, which has helped our production team improve a lot of R&D efficiency.
Here's a video showing our template for making a quadruped. It can be seen that this animal is actually like a mechanical puppy, supporting stretching, and trying to restore the vitality given to the character by the original designer. The various components of the body can be flexibly controlled, and it only takes half an hour to complete the character rigging with this tool. Below is a demonstration of the puppy's running animation, as well as an attack animation.
Shown below is the rig of the robot, which is based on the rig generated by the LSR tool, whether the character has several legs, or any irregular design of the torso, it can be flexibly supported. It can support a transformation effect similar to Transformers, and the entire rig can be completed in ten minutes. At the same time, the technology pipeline was pushed into Unreal Engine to enable more procedural animation.
The following is an introduction to the components of an action library of the LSR solution, which can precipitate the animation resources of many previous projects, so that many animation assets of the new project do not need to be remade, which can reduce the cost for us. This action library is based on Git management and supports cloud download to local computers. And the action library can automatically realize the animation retargeting of different body types, which greatly reduces the workload of animators.
The following shows that in the early stage of the project, in order to verify the movements of different body types, each body type had to be animated in the traditional process, but now with the precipitation of this technology, we only need to do it once, and we can quickly verify what body type is suitable for our game in the engine.
Another tool is DCC-Connector, which solves the problem of the work Xi of different animators, allows animators to reduce the cost of learning Xi, and retain more experience in the creation of art. Cross-body transfers are also supported, and the villain on the left side of the screen can transfer animations to larger characters in real time.
LSR has also developed a video toolset, the first of which is the video synchronization tool: there are a lot of video materials during motion capture, and these tools can be used to associate the video materials with the DCC timeline, which is convenient for animators to check and produce frame by frame;
The second is the video recording tool, which reduces the communication cost between teams and between CPs through the screen recording of the current scene, adding subtitles and other functions, and we have opened up the use of the tool in a variety of DCCs, for example, I learned it in maya, and I can Xi learn to use the tool in other software without paying new learning Xi costs.
The following is an exploration of the technical animation scheme, and the first video is played, which is the game "High Energy Hero", which we just launched some time ago. Compared with traditional shooting games, we have added a lot of animation modules to this product, and we have made multiple iterations of the game feel, which has also received recognition from players. On the right is an animation logic blueprint for the character section.
With the accumulation of animation 3C technology in many projects before, the team has some new ideas, whether it can realize the sharing and precipitation of animation technology in the engine like LSR, and accelerate the landing verification of engine animation in new projects.
The video below shows our new animation specialty, BasicEngine Animation Template. The different animation modules in the picture on the right can be flexibly split and assembled, and the basic 3C production of a game can be quickly realized. After this process, it only takes about a month to complete the basic 3C based on this framework, which can save a lot of time for the project and allow the team to have more energy to explore some gameplay.
With the tools and solutions mentioned above, how to synchronize the solutions to the suppliers and cooperation teams? Photonic Beauty Center has developed a product called Lightbox, which is a package management system based on rez, which ensures the uniformity of the project production software environment.
It also supports global collaboration, such as teams in North America and Singapore, and the video shown below shows that each project has its own space, and the software and DCC plug-ins in the space are stable and unified. After entering the project space, start Maya to ensure that the development environment is absolutely unified and stable.
The idea of future industrialization is also very consistent with some of the themes of today's conference, that is, embracing AI into a new industrial era, and here is a list of AI animation technologies that can now be used in game projects, such as AI skinning, animation based on neural network generation, AI-driven voice animation, expression animation, and a large number of group animations based on AI simulation.
This is Tencent's Game Performance R&D Department's Go Skinning demonstration AI skinning, you only need to click on the one-click skinning to feedback the results through the server, and the production of the skin can be completed. The skinning effect is basically close to the production level, and the efficiency is 6 times higher than that of the rigger binding skin, and if there are hundreds of characters in a project, it is conceivable that the cost savings are huge.
Another technology is Motion In between, which uses the neural network of the trained model to calculate the animation between keyframes to achieve smooth and natural transitions and improve the efficiency of animation production. The yellow figure in the upper left corner represents the keyframe, and the blue figure is automatically calculated according to the state of the keyframe. The leftmost character is the animation of the animator, the middle is the animation that was deliberately deleted, and the rightmost is the animation that is missing according to the Motion In between simulation, which can be seen that the improvement in animation production efficiency is very obvious.
Based on the accumulation of some current technologies summarized above, as well as the exploration of future solutions, we can see that the entire animation module has a lot of details, assuming that we only have three modules in the whole animation process, each module only saves 20% of the efficiency, and the whole project will save 50% of the cost in the animation production process. In this way, the team can spend more time and energy on the design and quality of the gameplay, so that I believe that in the near future, China's game development products can be more recognized internationally and achieve greater success.
That's all for my sharing today about the exploration of the industrial pipeline of game animation production, thank you.