Rob Di Figlia Talks Unreal Engine’s Development in Animation at MipJunior  

CANNES, France  — As international firms reduce in funding in youngsters IP, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine gives an answer in reducing prices, pace up manufacturing, in addition to refining high quality and unlock new codecs, Rob Di Figlia, Business Development Director, Epic Games informed an trade viewers at MipJunior on Saturday. 

He additionally showcased a medley of excerpts from key titles which have made use of Unreal Engine – which embrace Academy Award winner “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko,” “Piece by Piece” and “Predator: Killer of Killers.”

In unveils, Di Figlio sneak-peeked a 90-secondcinematic trailer from Beta completely animated by Unreal Engine whose teaser was proven at Unreal Fest. The trailer will probably be obtainable as a part of free animation pattern mission teaming Unreal Engine and Agora Studios to supply free animation pattern mission, permitting animators to see what different animates are doing. Agora launch the pattern within the subsequent few weeks, Figlio stated.

A sport engine software program platform most well-known for powering “Fortnite,” Unreal Engine made waves with its digital manufacturing utilization in “The Mandalorian.” At MipJunior’s Epic Games session, “Fast, Fresh, Unreal: Real-Time Kids Animation Is Here,” Di Figlia argued that Unreal Engine is as related to animation as dwell motion. 

“In 2019, though, right about when I was starting at Unreal Engine, there were probably less than five animation studios that we knew about using Unreal in any material way. But since then it’s grown to well over 100,” Di Figlio stated at MipJunior.

“Star Wars” and “The Mandalorian” actually put us within the highlight. But animation has been an enormous space of focus for us, and we’ve actually seen a progress over the past 5 years of animation studios, significantly collection animation studios, which were transitioning from their conventional CG pipelines into actual time pipelines,” Di Figlia stated. 

Reasons are “speed, creative and economic,” Also, “the future of entertainment is changing and becoming much more interactive and immersive,” Di Figlia added.

“Animation companies are under pressure – and this is not new – being asked to do more with less each year,” Di Figlia famous. “Unreal speeds up the process from rendering where instead of having days, hours, weeks to render things. It takes seconds. That has really sped up that process.”

At MipJunior, Di Figlio cited the case of Pure Imagination and Zebu, are actually utilizing Unreal Engine on normal animated TV collection manufacturing.

“They’re working up to 20% faster on their average 22 minute kids series. That’s taking a series from 60 to 70 weeks, down to 42 to 50. It’s a huge amount of time savings,” Di Figlio famous.

Just how studios select to make use of these advantages varies, nonetheless, he informed Variety. “Some studios say ‘I can reduce my time to do a series by 20%. Other studios say, ‘Look, my time is the same. However, I can get so much more fidelity and storytelling and production value that I’m getting 20% more on the same budget. Those are exciting areas where businesses are changing. And then, yes, you have AI and those things are in equation. We have clients that are using AI with Unreal Engine. It’s very exciting. “We’re watching how they’re using it.”

With Unreal Engine, animation studios can scale back storage prices avoiding compositing and never essentially needing to make use of a render farm anymore. 

The advantages of Unreal Machine are additionally inventive, Di Figlia argued. In conventional animation, a director crafts a narrative at storyboard section attempting to craft their story then palms it over to animation artists. 

Directors “don’t see what it’s going to look like for months and months, almost to a point where it’s too late or too expensive to change. Unreal Engine becomes a creative sandbox, which is very exciting for directors, because they can start doing lighting and testing things early on. They have much better information that they’re sharing downstream to really define looks, which is very exciting from the creative standpoint.”

“With all departments start working earlier and in parallel, this tends to blur the lines between pre-production, production and post-production, and your entire pipeline just becomes a lot more fluid,” stated Filho. 

“You have all of your artists and they’re working with all of your departments. They’re working together in the same environment and that really starts to unlock a whole new level of collaboration that you’ve never seen before,” he added.

One “huge moment” for Epic Games and Unreal Engine was “War Is Over!’s” successful the 2024 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, produced by ElectroLeague studio, with the animation and visible results created by Peter Jackson’s New Zealand-based VFX firm Wētā FX. 

“That’s a story that really talks about that iteration process. That they were really able to lean into iterating quickly in the engine to get that story to a place that they’re really happy,” stated Di Filho.  

Unreal Engine was additionally used for “Piece by Piece,” Morgan Neville’s 2024 American animated comedic bio-doc, 

made by the lens of Lego animation, or brickfilm.  It turned on American musician Pharrell Williams, who stars within the movie, “Piece by Piece” marking the sixth theatrical Lego-based movie

Produced by twentieth Century Studios, twentieth Century Animation and Davis Entertainment and once more utilizing Unreal Engine, “Predator: Killer of Killers” was a “really big, big film, very stylistic, said Da Filho. The Third Floor, which worked with Disney to make “Predator: Killer of Killers” had lighting and rendering groups which have been going so shortly there they have been lighting photographs in 4 hours with possibly an hour of retakes. By the time they bought to remaining photographs and presenting these to the studio, they finalized 1,700 photographs in lower than two months,” Figlio enthused.