Engine House Delve Into The Fourth Dimension

Engine House, a VFX and animation studio based in Cornwall, have taken animation into the fourth dimension with the 4D short film, Boys Vs Girls.

Boys are from Mars, Girls are from Venus... and Earth is their battleground. Mortal enemies and captains of their respective genders, The General and Pinkcess must initiate a search and rescue call to Earth when they are both missing a member of their crew. Little do they know of the adventures they will have and the dangers they will face!

The idea for the film was the result of a story collaboration between Engine House's own Mike Richter and film director Henry Davies from Stick and Rudder Films.

Engine House were tasked with taking the idea and outline storyboards and turn it into a ten minute attraction film that would have worldwide appeal.
This took many stages of production from script adjustments, additional storyboarding, previsualisation, look development, character design, animation, lighting, rendering and post.

Technology
To ensure a high standard of execution, Engine House adopted an innovative and highly efficient rendering technology that enabled a small company based in Cornwall to create something on such a large scale in such a short space of time. Octane Render was only recently out of its Beta testing phase, which Engine House had been a part of, but they trusted the technology to achieve the most effective production pipeline possible.

This hugely increased what the company is capable of achieving in terms of scale and quality of animation. Keeping a pipeline with low overheads and efficient turnaround has helped make the most of their creative flair and their client's projects.

Company Director, Mike Richter was knew that new GPU rendering was the right choice from the start, commenting: "I was really able to optimise lighting and render times while having maximum creative freedom, Octane enabled us to see 90% of the final image almost immediately in the viewport, making changes quickly was amazing, it's a much more of an artist driven process and is really fun just to play with a scene."

As well as the artistic benefit, GPU rendering also enabled Engine House to render the thousands of frames (twice as many when it’s a stereoscopic film of course!) without the need for a costly and cumbersome render farm that are traditionally used by VFX companies and animation studios. Some scenes were able to be rendered in seconds, as opposed to hours and minutes, which allows more time for that final polish, enhancing characters, and telling the story in the best possible way.

Character Design
The characters only existed on the written page so the team referenced online resources such as 3DTotal, Evermotion and ItsArt to create a shortlist of freelance character modelers who closely matched the style and vision for the project. Mike was really pleased when Andrew Hickinbottom signed up to model the female characters: "We've all been aware of the great work Andrew does, creating beautiful characters who are full of character and have a very distinctive style."

The project also benefitted from artists like Anders Ehrenborg and Alexey Klimov. Utilising freelance artists in this way meant that the right people modeled the characters and not by an artist trying to impersonate someone else's style and it also injected some new ideas to the project.

Stereoscopic
Stereoscopic storytelling is a prominent feature of film, especially within animation. A major hurdle for this project was to find an efficient way to overcome the tough challenges associated with stereo 3D films, so that the film was immersive without the undesirable side-effects. Most of these problems were solved with a custom camera rig Engine House developed themselves which could be used with Octane (stereo is since much better integrated with Octane out of the box) and an efficient pipeline between the 3D software and After Effects which was used for the majority of post-production.

Jason Robbins, Engine House's company director was aware of the problems with stereoscopic post-production from experience working with stereo film. "There are no short-cuts when it comes to stereo 3D, no quick fixes in post; whatever you have to do to one eye, you have to recreate on the other and that effect will sit somewhere in 3D space."

For this reason the team created most effects within the 3D software and if there were any errors the 3D scene was tweaked and re-rendered as opposed to being patched up; this was another great advantage of having such fast render times.

The future
Building on this success, Engine House are looking towards the future, and what these new capabilities can offer them. Virtual Reality is quickly growing and improving, and is something the team are looking at setting their sights on next. It is an exciting time within the industry and Engine House believe that their blend of creativity, skill and new technology puts them in good stead for the next step of innovative experiences.

This article is also available to read at BFV online.

(JP)