Disney - CG Supervisor
Big city greens - virtually Christmas
Real-time Broadcast Holiday Special
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Virtually Christmas was a unique hybrid episode of the Disney Television Series, Big City Greens. The show is traditionally 2D animation, but for this special our Real-time Animation team was brought in to create a custom “VR inspired” world called “Outpost Infinity” that would be done entirely in Unreal Engine. We had to completely reimagine the well known 2D characters into recognizable and appealing 3D counterparts. Every part of this special brought a new technical and creative challenge for our team to tackle.
Translating 2d charaters to 3d
The first challenge for this production was to define a style that would allow the characters to still look and feel like their original 2D counterparts, but would also still allow for versatility in creating appealing animation in Unreal.
BCG 2D Character Reference
Cricket Facial Range of Motion Test
Each character had it’s own share of challenges, but across the board we needed to find performant solutions that allowed for stepped animation, visibility toggling of sub-meshes, non-uniform scaling of the parent of a rotated child joint, and a variety of other storytelling driven, artistic choices.
Visibility Toggling
We needed to create a reliable pipeline for hiding sub-meshes of our characters because each character had to hit distinct phonemes that called for unique expression lines and teeth geometry that could vary frame by frame. We also were animating in a hybrid stepped twos method, so we wouldn’t be able to hide any geo scaling or blending with motion; instead meshes needed to disappear precisely according to our animators intent.
To solve this we used a vertex color based opacity masking system where the vis-toggle animation was written out to a null joint in our fbx files. This data was read into a custom component that then drove the desired toggling in dynamic material instances for each character.