New toolset brings real-time capabilities to creators of cinema-quality, stylized animated content; developed on top of Unreal Engine, pipeline features custom-developed visualization tools that introduce game engine rendering to features of traditional animation.
The Third Floor has launched TTF Anim, a new animation group and suite of tools for final animation that brings to storytellers and studios the capability of creating cinema-quality, stylized animated content completely within a game engine pipeline. The new tools facilitate early iteration and rapid progression of ideas and concepts in real-time to accelerate animation production.
The pipeline, which supports the production of finished, stylized animation sequences for screen formats and resolutions including 4K Dolby Vision, brings together features of traditional animation and game engine rendering, using TTF's visualization tools custom-developed on top of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. Creators can perfect characters, environments, and special effects with the speed of real-time engine rendering, taking assets into a shared sandbox to develop camera positioning, timing, lighting, coloring, and texturing in detail within and across scenes.
“The Third Floor has a legacy of reducing the gap between story inspiration and realization,” noted The Third chief creative officer and co-founder Josh Wassung. “We love visualizing stories and have dreamed for over 10 years of pushing visualization to the point we can share stylized, finished art with a wide audience. Harnessing Unreal Engine, The Third Floor’s pipeline is now ready to bring that dream to life through final animation.”
The initiative’s goal is to bring more flexibility to the animation creation process. Now, ideas can be progressed continuously, with faster rendering providing the freedom to turn around, review, and implement ideas and changes across the animation process.
An animated short film, Skytribe, produced in-house at The Third Floor, demonstrates the range of styles and realism that can be achieved with camera movement, facial modeling, and face/body animation.
Source: The Third Floor
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
