CGSociety - NHL/Stan Lee Superhero

CGSociety Production Coverage
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Vicon House of Moves completes NHL/Stan Lee Superhero franchise debut.
Monday, 31 January 2011

Vicon House of Moves (HOM), a leading motion capture and animation house, was contracted by Guardian Media Entertainment (GME), a joint venture between the National Hockey League (NHL) and SLG Entertainment led by Stan Lee of POW! Entertainment, to develop a short film as part of their launch efforts for new superhero franchise titled 'The Guardian Project.'

The Guardian Project Launch
The Guardians, 30 animated superheroes created to reflect NHL team attributes, were individually introduced throughout the month of January via an elaborate social media campaign promoted with broadcast and in-arena marketing support. The culmination of this campaign came during the NHL All-Star Game presented by Discover on January 30th in Raleigh, North Carolina in the form of an animated short created by Vicon House of Moves. The short played in the stadium, on both the Versus and CBC Networks and has also been posted online. The film introduces the new superheroes as they come together to battle villain Deven Dark while he attempts to take over the RBC Center stadium. A battle of good vs. evil ensues as the 30 superheroes leap into action, with the Carolina Hurricane saving the stadium fans, the Guardians and ultimately the RBC Center from utter ruin.





Each of the Guardian superheroes was designed by GME and brought to life as a CG character by HOM. Each of the superheroes derives traits from its city and team brand; the Oiler has a weapon that he plunges into the ground, the Bruin fights evil with his sonic roar, the Los Angeles King has his earthquake-inducing sword and more.

"Vicon House of Moves was a true partner from the get-go, working with us on the 3D build-out of the characters, designing what their signature moves would look like, developing story concepts, creating storyboards, doing the live action shoot, completing motion capture along with managing all of the animation, voiceovers and final edit and delivery," said Adam Baratta, Chief Creative Officer, GME. "Bringing 30 different characters to life, each of which is tied to on a highly revered NHL team, is no small task, and House of Moves was a great partner to work with on every step of this production."

Breaking Away with the Unreal Engine
Delivering this project mean't building a brand new pipeline for HOM. "The camera out of the box, is pretty unique," explains Alberto Menache, HOM visual effects supervisor and pipeline developer. "The fact is there is no actual lens in the Unreal Engine. This is solved by converting the external data into a different state, and importing to Unreal. Also the frames-per-second aren't exactly accurate, so it had to be modified as well. You don't get an alpha channel. It was like rendering a screenshot of the game you are playing; an 8-bit BMP file." Alberto set up a pipeline that would in turn generate alpha channels, z-paths, a post process at 60 to 100fps to generate ambition blur path as well.

"Everything is solvable, given the right amount of trial and error," says Alberto. "However, " chimes in Brian Rausch, vice president of production at House of Moves. "Our margin for error was pretty tight as we didn't have a tremendous amount of time to do it. We added eight shots, 48 hours before we shipped the show."

Any project with 30 different characters interacting in a mix of CG and live action environments would pose a challenge to even the largest animation house. In an effort to maximize production efficiencies, HOM used Epic Games' Unreal Engine to render this animated short for broadcast. This revolutionary application of traditional gaming technology to build high quality content for television was facilitated via HOM's proprietary workflow and a series of custom toolsets.

"Game engines give you the ability to light and render scenes interactively in real time, even when you're dealing with multiple characters. With the game engine you reduce the time that it takes to make critical creative decisions because you have the ability to pre-visualize fully rendered scenes," said Peter Krygowski, director, HOM. "We chose to produce this project using the Unreal engine not only for the reduced render time, but also the dynamic options you can have for environmental controls and effects that would not otherwise make sense for the resources at hand and the tight turnaround window we faced."

"We wrote several pieces of code to help generate custom shaders and to be able to bring virtual cameras into and out of the Unreal Engine for the purposes of this project," explained Alberto Menache. "As a result we had incredible creative flexibility, and could render out 8K frames in a matter of seconds, not to mention the savings in gear costs without the need for a multi-CPU render farm!"

In the future HOM aims to tie the Unreal Engine to the Vicon motion capture system so that clients will be able to see their recorded mo-cap performances integrated into game levels rendered in the game engine in real time.

"On a project like this, you have to think down the road of potentially extrapolating characters and environments into game assets, a television series, and flowing the CG creative elements between mediums. By building scenes in a game engine out of the gates, our options are much broader, the need to down res files from broadcast to game for example will be mitigated," explained Brian Rausch, vice president of production at House of Moves.

CG assets for the short were built using Autodesk Maya, Pixologic ZBrush and Autodesk MotionBuilder was used to retarget animation and navigate environments during motion capture sessions. HOM captured stunts and poses for each of the 30 Guardian superheroes at their 26,000 square feet of motion capture stages equipped with more than 200 Vicon T160 cameras over nine days of mo-cap shooting. The project was completed over six months with a team of creatives that started at 10 and grew to 200 at the project's peak.

The Guardian Project animated short at the NHL All-Star Game capped off a big hockey weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina that kicked off with NHL Fan Fair at the Raleigh Convention Center. In addition to the film, Vicon House of Moves designed a virtual interactive experience for The Guardian Project booth at NHL Fan Fair. The experience allows fans to don virtual reality goggles and immerse themselves into a computer-generated environment in which they get up close and personal with some of the newly introduced Guardian superheroes as they perform their signature moves.


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