“Welcome to Outpost Infinity!
AKA your totally customizable virtual reality!”
Virtually Christmas is a 3D Christmas Special from the Disney Television Animation (DTVA) show, Big City Greens ( Season 3, Episode 29). For this episode, our team was asked to collaborate with DTVA to create a 3d spectacular for Christmas and embodied the fun, love, wholesome and adventure filled experience with the Green’s family and taking them into a VR game world called Outpost Infinity. Our Real-Time Animation Team at Disney Media Entertainment worked together with Vendors around the world to help create this episode using the Unreal 4 Game engine to tell the story from start to finish. We explored new areas of pipeline, tech and art direction by building a robust workflow that helped us as a team to collaborate together to produce a high quality 3D television experience.
This was my first show as an Realtime Asset Supervisor, and it has been an exciting journey learning and experimenting with Art and Tech in one world. A lot of hardwork, time, dedication, attention to detail and love from our team was put into this episode, and I am excited to share my part of this adventure with you all reading. I have listed all the talented people on this journey that I have interacted with, and they truly deserve some amazing recognition for the work they have done on this episode as well.
Links
Virtually Christmas on Disney+
Unreal Spotlight
DMED 3D Team Credits
Mark Droste (Director)
Heather Flynn Chuang (Cinematic Director)
Megan Stifter (CG Supervisor)
Jennifer Burchfield (Animation Supervisor)
Rachel Donnelly (Lighting Supervisor)
Christina Douk (Das me! The Asset Soup)
Evan Binder (Pipeline Supervisor)
Drew Perlman (Animation Technical Director)
Rey Jarrell (Animation Technical Director)
Andy Wood ( Animation Producer)
Nimisha Kumar (Animation Line Producer)
Kaki Navarre (VP, Product Management and Media Technology)
Victor Cerny (Animation Production Supervisor)
Sarahjane Bernhisel
Vaughn Smith
Bryan Venzen
Megan Friedenberg
Priyam Parikh
Vendors
Twisted Mountain Animation
Chris Nelder (Rigging supervisor)
Maritza Louis (Vis Dev Modeler)
Brittany Moore (Modeler)
Erin Jung
Raymond Norton
Troy Liew
Haiwei Hou
Digital Fish
Superseed
Where do we even begin with designing?
Working from designs from the 2D show, their 2D Christmas special from season 2 and gathering references from video games like Fortnite, Overwatch, and Minecraft, we narrowed down some key elements of our design that stood as the basis of how we built the world of Outpost Infinity. Our focus was to create this game that felt awesome, fun, and vibrant with color. We played around a lot with shapes, silhouettes and color throughout each asset, keeping the forms more chunky and weighted and incorporating a more graphic and stylized wear. Color played an important role in the design as well. Outpost infinity carried mostly cool colors ranging from blue to pink and we reserved the brightest yellows, greens and warmer tones for the Green’s house and the characters so that they would pop and be our main focus.
Our production started out with the designs of the characters and seeing how they would assimilate into the world of Outpost infinity. Figuring out how the Greens in 2D would transfer to a 3D world was a big accomplishment and helped drive the design language of the Environments at the same time.
Designing an imaginary VR world that is Outpost Infinity
Outpost Infinity is a AAA VR world building and horde fighting game that exists in the world of Big City Greens. The game is aimed for teenagers and is currently in the winter DLC edition, filled with snowy landscapes and Christmas decor and more. The world is a canvas for the Greens family to explore and escape to build their new home away from home. But little do they know what lurks around them in the snow.
When we designed the greens house, it was a big focus to make it look convincing the greens family to stay in this VR world. We paid close attention to detail to pay homage to many aspects of Big City Greens and the house was a character of its own. We did not want to build the greens house as a 1 to 1 of the 2D design, but instead a variation of what you could build with materials and prefab assets that existed in the world of Outpost infinity. From there we could tint the colors a bit to make it feel just like the Greens home that we all know and love. After building the house we were then able to derive the rest of the video game world. We wanted the landscape to be lush, full, and exciting. Everywhere that you could travel had its own story to tell and it made it fun as a level designer to place little hidden gems everywhere. The world of Outpost Infinity was a vast landscape to explore and build and the possibilities were endless. Once all the assets were called out and built for the world, it all came down to set dressing to make the world lively and exciting
My role as a supervisor on this team
- Research and design the creative look and visual development of the episode with the CG Supervisor and department heads
- Work with the cinematic directors to create block out and previs versions of the set
- Create reference packets with block models, concepts and basic layout for Vendor teams
- Lead Vendor teams with asset creation, set build, and surfacing
- Provide feedback on Assets via Syncsketch, Live meetings, Slack, Documentation, and demos
- Level design, build the layout, and set dress the environments in Unreal
- Sculpt and Surface the Landscapes in Outpost Infinity
Other Responsibilities
- Collaborate on making a workflow and pipeline for real-time production
- Create best practices for the Asset pipeline for productions
- Use Unreal for Level Design, and asset preparation for Previs layout all the way to final production
- Creating Asset Packets for Concept, Modeling, and Surfacing for Vendor teams
- Work with other department supervisors to align workflows between each other.
- Work with asset vendors throughout the whole production, by creating tutorials, tools, guidelines, and have critique and review sessions
The process with Real-Time production
As we worked in the Unreal engine, all departments were able to work simultaneously during production across several levels and sequences which made updating in real time a very exciting experience. We started with cubes, cylinders and previs assets created by the cinematic directors who were able to work on layout, while the final assets were in production. We were able to use blueprints, sublevel nesting, landscape sculpting,and standin props to keep production moving for Animation, Cinematics, Lighting, and Tech, and once the models were final, we would be able to swap or update them in-engine. Every day was like a new present to our eyes when we synced all the files in perforce, reopened the project and pressed play in the sequencer. Unreal made iterating in-engine so much fun and interesting and it inspired the production and content creation as we kept moving forward.
It has been an exceptional journey using the Unreal Engine for a 3D linear animation television special, and with the power of working in real time, the exploration in level design, worldbuilding, and entertainment is endless.
Some of my most favorite moments was getting to develop an idea and play homage to the Big City Greens show. I worked on capturing assets and moments from the 2D and redesigning it in a way to make a 3D rendition of it with a very talented team of artist