The 2018 Annecy International Animated Film Festival has brought us waves of news, both domestically and abroad, in terms of animation. Presentations this year have shown that animation is a big priority for many developers globally, and we now have some information on some developing technology in one of the French studios.
TeamTO is a French cg studio and this year they previewed
Mighty Mike & The Wild Bunch, which follows a clumsy pug and several of his animal companions in a suburban home. It is being marketed as a cross between
Tom and Jerry and pet home videos and is a hyper-real animated animal series that needed advancements in technology in order to develop. As TeamTO President and CEO Guillaume Hellouin was initially inspired when seeing the character of "Mike" in a proof of concept animation, which was produced by Digital Dimension, and seeing that it had been designed to test GPU rendering to render fur efficiently, he had to take it up a notch in terms of tech to meet the proper quality.
While not specifically adopting Digital Dimension's GPU rendering approach, TeamTo still set out to develop bespoke in-house software to help in the creation and the animation of the characters from
Mighty Mike. Overmind is the name of the first piece of software developed in the name of
Mighty Mike & The Wild Bunch, which was developed to aid with production management. Meanwhile, Rumba is a collaborative project between TeamTO, French public research body Inria, and Mercenaries Engineering, which is also the company that develops the rendering software Guerilla Render.
TeamTO handles rendering it's characters by utilizing Renderman's new physically plausible rendering architecture, RIS. This allows for lighting setups to be applied throughout the show rather than lighting each individual shot. You can read comments from the Director of Marketing which go into more detail on the software.
"It's animation software which helps to animate in a 'kind of live way'. For example, imagine you're doing the animation and right away you can see the result. It's great because it makes animating much more efficient. However, it's tough at the same time because it's the first time that we're actually using it on a large scale production. So we have all the issues of trial and errors of a new piece of software. But in the end when all this will be behind us, it will be great because it will be a good benchmark to see what this software can do.
The reason for developing it, deep down, is that we are producing Mike one hundred percent in France where the costs are higher than a lot of other countries, meaning we have to be much more efficient in the output so that we can compete cost-wise. So the only way to be efficient is to have the better software that is more fine-tuned and customized to your production." - Patricia De Wilde, Director of Marketing and New Business at TeamTO
How do you think these developments will effect Animation development going forward? Do you think Mighty Mike & The Wild Bunch looks like something you'd be into watching? Let us know in the comments! Mighty Mike & The Wild Bunch is expected to launch on Cartoon Network in France in 2019.