Reel FX populates "Super Giant Robot Brothers" in Unreal Engine with Atoms Crowd
13/10/2022
How did you use Atoms on Super Giant Robot Brothers?
At the beginning, Crowd was not planned for the show, but with the amount of cars and people in the street we finally decided that Crowd was necessary.
SGRB was done with Unreal engine but as we joined in a hurry with really short timing, we needed to find a solution to avoid creating a full pipeline and train the team. So we decided to split our Crowd production in 2 parts.
We built our Crowd assets in Maya and in UE in parallel, we did our simulations into Maya and then imported our caches in Unreal Engine. Thankfully Atoms is correctly integrated in UE and the transition with Maya was really easy to do.
Is there any particular feature and workflow you like about our software after having used it in production?
The main strength of Atoms is its simplicity. It’s really easy to create assets, do a simulation and play with caches and overrides.
Everything is built to help you in that way. SGRB was a real challenge with the time we had and one of the issues was that we didn’t have any animation cycles provided by animation. So we used many mocap cycles found on the internet and as every Crowd artist knows, retargeting could be really tricky sometimes.
The retargeting system on Atoms was really helpful here. Really simple to use and set and it was working perfectly fine. Another example of this simplicity was when we built the Unreal Engine part and overrides caches and variations. Our Crowd system into Maya was really basic, different agents type with different clips but no variations. We decided to override the variations directly into Unreal as all the final assets were there.
Unfortunately with the short timing we had, the Crowd team couldn’t do it. So I needed to teach someone how to do that. The person I needed to train never touched any Crowd software and didn’t know anything about Atoms or Crowd in general, but he was ready to create a variation by himself and override the cache we provided to him in less than a half day!
How many artists were working on your crowd shots? Do you think Atoms scales well following your production needs?
There were 2 artists on the show and myself as Crowd supervisor.
This show was really challenging as we were out of our standard pipeline, with a lot of shots to do in a really short time.
We couldn't have achieved this without the Atoms power and the possibility to easily switch different software.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Atoms software is great, but your support is even better.
You are always ready to help when we are in trouble with a tool or an asset with very fast turnaround.
It’s really appreciated especially when having little time to deliver as happened to us.
