The Pixel Architects

Coverstory

Meet the people who bring animation and gaming to life—and find out how you can become one of them.

-BY DUSHYANT KHILNANI, MONALI GAIKWAD & BRIAN PEREIRA

It’s an amazing experience to sit back in a theatre and watch inanimate objects like automobiles come to life, and behave like human beings. Of course, it takes loads of imagination to come up with a complete script for a fi lm like Cars. But can cars really talk, sing and dance? Of course not! Yet, as we sit in that theatre, the “power of disbelief” takes over as our minds open up to accept the impossible—thanks to the sheer expertise that goes into making quality animation films. And it’s the same with games. Good story plots, realistic graphics and great sound can make for a very immersive experience.

So what exactly goes on in the development of an animation film or game? What type of professionals are needed and what skills must they have? To find out, CHIP visited studios and training schools and talked to highly experienced executives there. We met students of animation, inspected facilities and asked about career prospects. What does it take to get to DreamWorks or Pixar? What’s the potential for the Indian Animation and Gaming industries?

According to the Nasscom Animation and Gaming Report 2008, the gaming industry in India is expected to reach USD 1060 million by 2012 at a CAGR of 50 percent. The market for animation entertainment is now valued at USD 120 million. Clearly, this presents a lot of opportunity.

As one industry pundit puts it, “Indian audiences are open to new innovative content that is marketed well.”

What we now need are original ideas, quality production, some serious investment and good content.

Pre - production

Albeit animation and gaming are different fields, their roots meet for they share common developmental processes. Both development cycles begin with conceptualization and brain-storming. For instance, animation involves strong forms of communication such as acting, emotions, expressions and storytelling. A script is prepared, which is similar to a movie script. And gaming involves conceptualization.

During the course of our research, we spoke to Amol Gurwara, Head of Operations, Mobile Division, EA Games India and learnt that EA makes games based on movies and books, such as the Harry Potter series. To stay true to the franchise, they extract the spirit of the movie and use it for the storyboard. For games such as football, EA emulates the real venues, players’ and uniforms. This sums up the conceptualization stage.

Somil Gupta, Managing Director, Trine Entertainment said, “In the Conceptualization phase, we design our asset’s look, shape, colors and ‘feel’.

In animation too, the process is initiated with paper and pencil and 2D animation (this is also called traditional animation technique). Doing so maintains the link with humanlike reality. Gokul K, HOD at Whistling Woods International says, “The basic fundamentals of traditional animation techniques are very important and 3D animation comes later in our course.”

Animation: Animation filmmaking has a pipeline with many processes. After the script is ready, the concept art is prepared and then comes the preproduction stage. A character bible is prepared which defines the characters in the film, which is followed by 2D photomatics (modeling), 3D production, rendering, compositing, editing, sound mixing and final corrections. The entire process moves forward only if the director approves the characters (sketches), and then the characters go for digitization and geometrical constructions.

Gaming: The process of animation is an integral part of game development. But the latter involves more than just that. Ovi Lupas, Director of Development at Trine Games and Amol Gurwara of EA Games gave us a collective insight into the pipeline. After the conceptualization, other parameters are sorted beforehand such as business strategy, Game Design Document (GDD), Technical Design Document (TDD), an alpha and a beta release and fi nally the testing. This process is more or less same for game development across all platforms and devices. Poornima Iyer, a lead game designer at India Games opines, “There is no difference in the stages of developing a mobile or a PC game”. A GDD decides the art and a TDD deals with the technicalities. In this section we will talk only about the GDD and move on to the common factor—animation. Later, you'll see the technical leads of a game in action.

In the GDD, the designers brainstorm over the concept. This document decides the levels of a game, diffi culty level, scoring systems, physical appearance of characters, complexity, and the sequels intended. Basically, a GDD decides what the game must look like in the end. A TDD is referred to in parallel with a GDD to keep the artists and the technicians ‘on the same page’. A TDD is where the game development cycle parts ways with the animation cycle. In a sense that technical aspects such as human inveracity and compatibility are prioritized.

The Businesses: Businesses, and the markets that they cater to, are interdependent and the animation or gaming industries are no exceptions. At EA Games for instance, strategies are in place in the pre-production stage. Here, they have discussions around the business logic and their target audience. However, if there are ideas linked with a franchise or a brand, then operations are subject to constraints. Licensing involves developers talking to Hollywood studios and vice-versa, followed by resolving fi nancial matters. Companies agree upon either revenue shares or fixed plus revenue shares. Decisions are taken regarding launches of a game in various
languages and countries.

What we’ve discussed so far is just the tip of the iceberg. There lies an ocean of exciting information ahead. And if you’re reading this right now, you definitely want to go all the way to the end of the story!

Modeling

The concept art and sketches give artists a clear picture of what needs to be created. Modeling converts this art into 3D representations. Yiannis K, a producer and art director at Trine Games,
mentioned that one of the techniques for doing this is polygon modeling.

A polygon can be called a foundation on which 3D models are created. Usually rectangular in shape and representing a flat surface of a model, it is surrounded with a number of edges. This technique works on individual parts of a model or piece by piece, and involves vertices or points where lines meet. As the complexity and accuracy of the model’s appearance increases, so does the count of polygons, vertices and edges. And the artists have to fight them to maintain a nice ‘flow’ and to ensure that a character’s movements appear realistic in the stages that follow. To create a behavioral and a trueto- life model, references for creases, wrinkles and other intricate details are considered.

There are mainly two types of models: low-polygon and highpolygon. The former have a lower count of polygons, faces and vertices. This makes them more flat, so to speak, and hence less accurate. But they can be rendered faster and hence can make do with lesser processing power.

If you recollect the older games, only the primary object used to look good. For instance, in a racing game, only the dashboard of a car was given high-resolution imagery and the tracks and surrounding woods would be of low quality and seemed distorted, simply because they were low-poly models and the car’s dashboard was a highpoly one. With so much processing power available today, developers make everything on highpoly models to make games and animation more realistic. High-poly models have more polygons, vertices and edges, and also need serious processing power. In the initial stages of animation, low-poly models are used and are later substituted with high-poly ones. Another dominant technique that Yiannis mentioned was digital sculpting, but that again is in another league altogether.

Careerscope: Modelers, designers.

Texturing

Texturing gives a breath of life to the model, an artistic and colorful life at that. This stage can make or break a model or character. Since a modeler already has a crystal clear image of the model and knows exactly what he wants out of it, texturing too is usually by him. This prevents the risk of mentally detaching the model from its texture and gives it a unified feel.

Little imperfections and glitches are fixed to make the illusion more detailed and realistic, or, on the other hand, to make a nicely created model look dull and boring—it depends what the game calls for.

If you thought that modeling is complex, be ready for surprises. Texturing too can be as complex and intricate as you want it to be. This is because it’s about art and art is only limited to the imagination. Texturing truly blends the character with its surroundings. References from nature
and industrial themes are used here, which adds to the time-consuming process of texturing.

Character details such as a fur coat or clothes, hair, eye color, skin texture, wrinkles, bruises and such are included in this process. Usually artists work with tools such as Adobe Photoshop for keeping the character lifelike. Environmental details involve surfaces and textures of inanimate objects such as wood, stone, water droplets and waves, trees, leaves, smoke and dust. To obtain good results use tools such as ZBrush which provide accuracy and attention to detail. In texturing, the challenge is that the closer the subject comes to the camera, the more the need for detail. A major part of quality and detail of a character depends on the way it has been modeled and also depends largely on the texture being used. Hence, similar to the low-polygon and high-polygon theory, the higher the details in texturing the closer a model is to reality.

Careerscope: Textutespecialists for skin, fur, surfaces, environments.

Rigging

This stage is the backend and the beginning of animating a model, and this is where a character truly comes to life. Here, picture the model as though it is a puppet which needs defi ned points where the strings will be attached. First, each part of the model is divided into parts, depending on the complexity of the required animation. Each part is marked in places which respond to the rigging artist’s controls. Parts once marked, are put back together to complete the skeleton or ‘rig’. With these points in place, the rigging artist seamlessly makes the model move in the intended way. The rig comprises of bones, other details and certain presets or parameters.

Technically speaking, this process involves linking or creating a relationship between two objects, which allow controlling each of them individually. Another thing to note are the ‘bones’ created, which are pre-linked to each other (somewhat like a DNA strand in a cell). This linear series of objects is known as a chain, which helps to add animation controls to the skeleton, and act as the basis of the rig. When two or more chains are linked together as a complex structure, it’s called a hierarchy. The process of making this hierarchy move or animating it is known as kinematics.

Once the skeleton is ready and its movements are controllable, it is fused into the model or the ‘mesh’. The process of putting the skeleton and the mesh or model together is called skinning, which almost completes the rigging process. Of course, there are other tools such as skin modifiers used for polishing.

Animation done using computer graphics goes back to hand-drawn images characters. Through this medium, a character’s movements, expressions and the eight basic emotions that they teach in the fi eld of psychology, are pronounced and brought to life. Again, there are many more if combinations are taken into consideration.

Animation is obviously not restricted to live characters and is a mandate for ‘inanimate’ objects (like a moving tree) too. Incorporating technical elements such as where the weapons are to appear, or the outburst of a fi re and such also need animation.

What we’ve discussed here, is only a fraction of what goes into animating a model for a movie or a game. But it will surely give you a good idea of how it all starts and progresses.

Careerscope: Riggers, Maya specialists.

Lighting

Lighting in 3D modeling is an excellent opportunity and a mandate when it comes to realism in a game or movie. In addition to texturing and rigging, lighting signifi cantly adds realism to a character and its surroundings. However in 3D modeling, lighting by itself is an illusion. It determines and extracts the true potential of the work which is already done on a model. On the other hand, it may even destroy all of it, if not applied skillfully.

The process has two main aspects to it: character lighting and background lighting, where both need to complement each other. Both have their own stages or passes such as foreground pass, props pass and such. Ambient occlusion is an important integral part in 3D lighting. For instance,
in photography, there are ways to bounce light off one object to make it fall on another to increase illumination. 3D applications lack this realism, and therefore bounce-lights along with ambient occlusion take care of it.

3D modeling is very diff erent in live action movies that are shot with video cameras, especially when it comes to lighting. In the 3D world the effects of lighting are emulated to match that of real-world scenarios. The model and its surroundings both need to change according to the light thrown at them, just as they would in reality.

Take a look at this picture. Here the light source is located atop the right corner of the car. Notice the intensity of light moving away from the source and hence the gradient or the loss of contrast from the back to the front. Look at the glare on the surface of the trunk and how dark the bonnet is, the color of the car and its windows and of the windshield. In technical terms, this is the decaying of light, in which the light decreases as the object or its surface moves away from the source.

Here the light source is not shown, otherwise there are illusions where the light aff ects its source and its immediate surrounding. For instance, if it’s a fluorescent tube, it has to have a cool haloing effect around it and for a tungsten bulb, the halo changes to yellow. When showing a softer light, even the outline of the bulb would be seen and the halo would be dimmer. While this is just a summary of what goes into animation, there’s much more for your to explore, so stay with us, the ride is about to get a little bumpier.

Careerscope: Background and character lighting specialists.

Animation

In traditional (2D) animation, images were drawn by hand on transparent sheets called ‘cels’. The same image was drawn on a series of cels with only slight diff erences between drawings, to show the movement of objects. The cels were then filmed in sequence. An illusion of movement was created when playing back the fi lm at 24 fps. This is how you can create a 2D animation film.

There are many processes in the animation pipeline. These processes are also applicable to game development. We have already explained processes like character building (also called asset building), modeling, rigging, texturing and lighting. After the asset building stage the remaining production processes can occur simultaneously. For instance, lighting and sound mixing can happen in parallel. Here are some important processes in the animation pipeline.

Background building: In this stage, you create the props and the background set on which you will impose the characters later. It could be a street or even an indoor scene. The concept sketches are fi rst created. Once they are approved, you refine the drawing and create a low-resolution version. Add more details to this sketch to make it a hi-res one. Then you fill the objects with shading to create a grey scale image. A color version is produced and textures are added. Finally, you add in the background lighting. Once the background is created, it’s time to overlay the characters. The actual animation of characters involves a series of sub-processes.

Animatics: We’ve explained that various stages in animation production occur simultaneously. At some point during the production, you want to create a rough mock-up, to see if everything fits together. How will the scene look with motion and timing? How will the characters look against the backgrounds? A series of rough drawings are put together in sequence and a dialog and soundtrack is added. This subprocess is called Animatics. The director can call for changes after viewing this mock-up. Once he is satisfied, the teams can progress further, working together.

Facial animation: If your film has characters of humans or animals then you’ll want to show emotions. Facial expressions convey a lot of emotion. So you have to give your characters virtual facial muscles. In fact, you need to rig the face and defi ne rules about what shapes different areas of the face will take to show emotions like anger, laughter, disappointment and so on.

Layout: Here you defi ne the placement of characters against the backgrounds. If there are multiple characters in the shot, you show the position of a character in relation to the other characters in that frame. Camera angles are decided, and backgrounds may have to be refined.

Acting: In this stage human actors play out the scene. They may use props like an umbrella or a ball. The idea is to understand the movement of the body limbs and changing positions in relation to the other characters in the scene.

Blocking: Once the movements of the characters in the scene are understood, it’s time to begin blocking. In this animation technique the key poses of the characters are created (not the complete movement). The objective is to establish the timing and placement of the characters and props in a scene.

Character Animation: The complete movements of all the characters are now defined. Lighting eff ects, detailed backgrounds and texturing may be excluded for now, so that the file size is not too large. These are added after fi nalizing the animation.

Compositing: In this stage, all the layers are put together. The resulting image has the complete look of the whole shot. The director may choose to make revisions. Then the render specialist does the rendering. Depending on the complexity, it takes between 1 to 4,000 CPUs to render a film.

Here's how complex it can get. Film has 24 frames per second. Each of those 24 frames has multiple images of the characters. There are various lighting passes for the characters: background pass, foreground pass, shadow lighting, bulb lighting and fur lighting. The compositor puts all this together and makes one image and he does this 24 times to one second. Typically, there are 50 passes per frame for 24 frames, for one second of animation!

OPPORTUNITIES: The animation pipeline has several processes and there are specialists for each process. You could choose to specialize in rigging, rendering, lighting, story writing, texturing or in any other area. Even within a process, there are smaller specialization areas. For example, within texturing you can choose to be a fur specialist or a skin specialist. Within lighting, there’s background lighting and character lighting. It would be a good idea to understand all the processes within the animation pipeline. During your training, get involved in as many processes and departments as you can. You will then be in a position to decide where you fit in.

Gaming

During the game development stages, most of the game companies use two teams: the Graphics or the Art team and the Technical team. The graphics team takes care of the entire look of the games, with respect to the characters, environment, textures, lighting and so on. The technical team is responsible for developing the functionality of the game and integrating the graphics, movements and stages across diff erent platforms. While the graphics team refers to the Game Design Document (GDD) for all the information they need to create the art, the technical team develops and follows the Technical Design Document (TDD) in parallel with the GDD. The TDD covers all the information related to the game under development such as memory allocation, resource utilization, different categories of devices in case of mobile games, temporary storage, the platform (PC, PSP, Xbox) on which the game is going to work and so on. Depending on the type of game, decisions are also made regarding servers, downloading resources, planning the micro transactions and unlocking resources if any in the game and so on.

In the TDD, they also make a decision on the type of engine they are going to use. There are different types of engines available for every type of game; an example of this is a side scrolling engine for games such as Mario. Tarun Durga, Creative Head, Zapak Games informs, “The game engine is the code that works as the basic DNA of the game. It is the actionscript code or the C++ code that drives the game and everything else is built around it”.

The decision regarding the game engine is very crucial as it also controls the way the art (character, textures, maps etc) is displayed in the game and the restriction of the movement of the character or the attributes of the racing car, for example. So the game engine lays down the coding standards for the game and then they break it down into Java, Symbian, C++ and other platforms, on which the game will run. Most of the gaming companies develop their own engines and tweak it according to the requirement of the game. And what about the decision about the choice of game engine? Amol from EA games said, “There will always be a tussle between the game designer’s aspirations and what is technically achievable. The designer will always expect a lot of things like stereophonic sound, for instance. But that’s not always possible. So you get into a situation where you work on what is best and what is feasible”.

After the TDD is frozen and all technical requirements of the game are in place, the art team and technical teams initiate the production stage where the art for the game is developed, as we have seen earlier, and the coding for integrating the character, textures, maps and stages of the game into the engine begins. As we have mentioned earlier, the coding will again be developed depending on the type of engine and the platform of the game. For example, to make Flash games, they use action scripting or lingo scripting, VC++ or C++ for PC games and J2ME or Java for mobile games. They also build code so as to detect the platform and load the required resources accordingly. For example, there are different mobile phones with different screen and memory sizes. So to tackle this, they create diff erent resource banks and the resource files which match that particular phone and its resolution is pulled into the program. For mobile games, the respective service providers also provide the Software Development Kits (SDK) for the games to be integrated in the code such that the games can be distributed on their network, and to ensure that it is built according to their requirements. The code also defi nes the stages, diffi culty levels, speed of the car, path, check points and all these important attributes of the game. The initialization code for diff erent platforms is also mentioned in the coding stage.

After the code and graphics are integrated in the engine they get the alpha build of the game which is sent to the clients to see if all their requirements are met. As Yashraj Vakil, Game Development, Zapak Games informs, sounds are usually not integrated with the game in the alpha build. "After the clients give their feedback on the game and the required changes are incorporated, the sounds are added to the game and we get the beta build of the game," says Vakil. There are many iterations that go on between these stages as there are several challenges
that are encountered during the game development process. Once all these iterations are done, the game then goes into the testing phase.

Testing is the most important stage of game development as a lot of time, eff ort and investment goes into making the game and a bug will ruin it all. Mobile games go through two types of testing: Frontline testing and Deployment testing. In frontline testing, the game is tested for things like the playability of the game, difficulty level and checking the integration of sound with the game. After these bugs are fixed, the game is sent for deployment testing, where the game goes through checklists and certifications and then goes for the Porting stage.

Partho Sengupta, R&D Lead, Indiagames explained porting in brief. “Porting a game basically involves taking your game code for one platform and rewriting a part of it so that it works on another platform. Most common diff erences between diff erent platforms occur in the way they handle sounds, networking, their display configurations, fi le and data management. So a programmer trying to port a game between platforms needs to study the functioning of both platforms thoroughly and figure how out how to make things work on the new platform without affecting the game too much”. After the porting stage, the game is ready for release on a platform like online, mobile, PC or Playstation.

CHIP VERDICT

Eighty five domestic animation movies were announced at the beginning of 2008, with 28 already in various stages of production. It was estimated that 15 animation movies would be released over the next two years. Indian animation films produced in 2008 did not do well at the box office. New strategies were tried, like bringing in films from abroad and dubbing these with the voices of Bollywood stars. But that did not work either. Now all animation films in production here have been put on hold.

STARK REALITIES

The industry has been through a phase where work was outsourced to India because of the cost advantage. While all the creative work and conceptualization was done in the West, Indian studios just executed the work. Large swarms of animators were employed to do this. This demand gave rise to many “animation” schools in the 90s and early 2000s. Most of these schools
had a software-centric curriculum. They neglected the aesthetics or fundamental animation techniques. So India wasn’t really developing any original content and there was no intellectual property to speak of. Soon the companies that were outsourcing work to India found that they could get this work done at a lesser cost in countries like Korea. Suddenly India had a lot of competition for outsourced jobs in the animation sector. It was time for the industry to find another way.

In the second phase (that began last year) Indian studios began to develop original IP. There were films based on Indian themes. Sadly many of these did not do well at the box office. Industry experts say Indian studios copied concepts and themes from Hollywood films and the quality of these films left much to be desired. Also, the investment in production and marketing was far less. The Indian animation industry needs to develop unique concepts which could take years to gain acceptance. The Japanese, for instance, have Anime, which is now well known worldwide. Anime dates back to 1917, so it did take a long time to gain global acceptance. Also, the industry here needs to pioneer techniques and technology. For instance, Pixar invented RenderMan, a software for rendering animation, because they couldn’t find suitable software that met its needs. George Lucas’ Lucas Arts invented THX sound for Star Wars.

So it takes a combination of investment, unique style, original IP, serious commitment and time. There is huge potential, but success will come after a few years. And yes, we need good films!

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN AN INSTITUTE

1. VISITING FACULTY: While doing the course, it is important to have industry perspective. This will help you understand industry requirements and you can relate to topics in the curriculum accordingly. Only industry people like producers, composers, directors and studio executives can give you this kind of perspective. Ask if the institute invites guest lecturers from the industry.

2. FACULTY EXPERIENCE: Perhaps the most important thing to check is the background of the faculty. If your guru is knowledgeable and experienced you can be sure that you will actually learn something. How many in-house trainers does the institute have? Who are they? Check their industry experience. What films do they have to their credit? Have these won awards like BAFTA?

3. TRAINING TECHNIQUE: Most institutes focus on the software. They teach you tools such as Maya, 3DS MAX, Zbrush, Combustion, After Eff ects, Premier and others. But there’s very little focus on aesthetics or the art of animation and fi lm making. How many schools emphasize on the importance of perfecting the classic animation (2D) technique? Do these schools conduct workshops on alternative animation techniques such as Claymation?

4. CURRICULUM: The duration and curriculum is often an indicator of the quality and depth of the course. It must be a full-time course (full day) of at least two years duration. Is the curriculum aligned to industry requirements? Ask for a preview of the syllabus.

5. SHORT FILMS: The best way to learn how to make an animation film is to make a short film. In doing so you go through the complete pipeline and understand the techniques. You also learn to work in a group. This will develop leadership and project management skills too.

6. INFRASTRUCTURE: Does the institute have the latest software? How often are the systems upgraded? Do they have a render farm? Also look for other infrastructure such as a library, dubbing studio, film cameras, camera cranes, lighting equipment and recreational facilities.

7. HANDS-ON TRAINING: How much time is spent on sketching, rigging, lighting, sound recording and other processes? Do they teach you film making techniques? Will they let you handle a camera or sound mixer?

8. PLACEMENT RECORD: Ask about the placement record of previous batches. Where are their students working now? What kind of contacts does the institute have with studios in India and abroad?

9. TECHNICAL PARTNERSHIPS: Students must always have access to the latest technology. Some institutes have technical partnerships with IT hardware manufacturers like Apple, Intel and nVidia. They sign up for R&D programs and also get the benefit of getting upgrades regularly. Then there are special licensing schemes for animation software.

10. EXPOSURE: Exposure to global standards is important. What kind of resources does the institute offer to keep its students abreast with the latest developments?