A recent project by Axis Animations resulted in three and a half minutes of crazy free-fall explosive madness. The animation, an opening cinematic to Halo 5: Guardians, the next installment in the legendary saga of Master Chief, was produced for Microsoft and 343Industries.
Here, three members of the Axis team - Debbie Ross, executive producer; Stu Aitken, creative director; and Sergio Caires, CG supervisor - take readers behind the scenes as they help set the tone for the new game.
Who approached you for the cinematic?
Ross: We were approached by 343 Industries Cinematic Director Brien Goodrich about the project. We had developed a great relationship with the 343 Industries team over a number of different projects for the Halo franchise, and it was great to get another opportunity to work with the team.
What was the directive?
Aitken: For the opening cinematic, the brief was a bit different from our usual projects. Brien and his team had been planning the sequence for a while and had already started working on some previs. Our job was to integrate into 343 Industries' layout and animation pipeline and take their finished animation scenes and make them look amazing. We created the detailed and complex environments assets, shaded all the assets, created all the visual effects, and provided all the lighting and picture finishing.
How long did it take to do?
Ross: The project was part of a bigger set of work that took around six months.
How many people worked on this?
Ross: Our team size probably averaged 20 people across the whole timeframe of the project.
Did you use any game footage or models directly?
Aitken: There is no game footage in the sequence, but we did get access to certain examples of in-game elements, such as effects, to make sure we tied the look of the game into the opening cinematic.
Most of the characters models were supplied by the 343 Industries modeling team, and their character pipeline is very similar to ours, so they were fairly straightforward to integrate into our shading process.
Did you rework the models? If so, please detail the process.
Caires: Our shaders support normal-mapped assets, so we can closely replicate the real-time shading if we want to. Naturally, we have to take things up a notch depending on how good the assets are and as the timescales allow. In this case, they were holding up very well, so we used some procedural shading tools to add detail/nuance where the maps start to run out, so the assets are a little more lived in,' with a bit of dirt gathering in corners, a few more chipped edges, and fine scratches that come into play in close-up shots.
Of course, these characters need to have hair, and this is an area where typically there can be no direct re-use, but very luckily 343 Industries were using the same techniques we normally use for hairstyles, so we were able to extract key hair strands to input into our highly customized hair tools as usual.
What software did you use for the content creation process?
Caires: At Axis, we use pretty much any software for modeling. However, the mainstays are The Foundry's Modo, Autodesk's Maya, and Pixologic's ZBrush. We also use Maya for animation/rigging, and Side Effects' Houdini for shading, lighting, effects, and rendering, with Blackmagic's (formerly Eyeon's) Fusion as our compositing tool.
Over the years, we have developed our Maya facial rigging tools to allow animators to deliver the nuance and quality we are constantly striving for. These tools are largely automated and very flexible and scalable - the more information/shapes we put in, the better the result, without modification to the tools. They also hook up perfectly with the various facial mocap suppliers we use.
For modeling, it's basically a free for all. Use whatever you like, so long as it is able to export FBX files, which we then pass through a publishing process that converts it into an Alembic file and adds a few attributes our shaders expect to see (material assignments, rest position). The idea being that a Houdini asset can be immediately created, in parallel with other pipeline stages. Of course, we also automate the creation of shaders based on the assignment already present on the mesh. Texture publishing follows a similar process, so that we can largely automate the time-intensive texture assignment aspect of shading.
If the textures follow physical-based values, then shading can be essentially done as soon as the textures are loaded. Long ago, we came up with a similar shader parameterization to what is now well publicized by Disney, which is the Metal-based workflow. This is an extremely efficient way to shade because with as few as three textures (roughness, albedo, metal), a shader is often completely done as soon as the maps go in.
Following a physically based approach is something we have found greatly helps achieve much better quality and is faster and easier. It is the exact opposite to the alternative of many wrong theories as to how the final output looks the way it does, which, of course, differ among non technical artists and would commonly cause consistency and rendering problems in the process.
Houdini is used for all effects, lighting, and rendering in Houdini's Mantra. We have a history of being very, very early adopters of Houdini technology for the purpose of creating hyper-real and photoreal fully animated projects - starting as far back as Houdini 8. I firmly believe there is currently no better fully integrated environment in which to render complex projects. Everything about it makes the process very flexible and controlled. Contrary to popular belief, despite the immense power and complexity you can optionally unravel, it's a very easy software for lighters and shading artists to pick up. We generally find artists who have never
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A recent project by Axis Animations resulted in three and a half minutes of crazy free-fall explosive madness. The animation, an opening cinematic to Halo 5: Guardians, the next installment in the legendary saga of Master Chief, was produced for Microsoft and 343Industries. 
