Workflow and production

This post will cover some of the basic information about the creation process of R6. In later posts I will get into more detail about each stage.

I've segregated the production of R6 into 3 stages: Pre production, 3D production, and Post production.

Pre production:
This stage includes everything up until the actual 3D work starts.
The major landmarks here are the synopsis and scripts, the art, and the storyboarding.
Basically, this was the process: we came up with the initiative to make an internal sci-fi short, akin to a video game trailer. The goals were doing something fun, learning from it, and showing off what we can do (to ourselves, as well). After a few ideas came up and went down, we finally settled on the basics for R6 which answered all of our goals (a fictional video game trailer, approached from a short-film point of view more than that of an actual hype-trailer).
All this time Ilan Baffet and myself were sketching and conceptualizing designs for the project. After we had a synopsis and a rough storyboard, I did the art the 3D artists would later use for reference.
The correct course of action would be to have a tight storyboard before the 3D production starts, but as things would have it, we ended up doing several, rather substantial changes to it after some of the assets have been created in 3D - because we had a few months hiatus from the project and decided to improve what we could in the story and the direction while we could.

3D production:
This is where things start getting more streamlined. In this stage I include everything done in 3D - from the modeling stage up to the rendering stage.
The 3D production can be readily divided into two parts: asset creation and shot treatment.
Asset creation is just that. Creating all the assets - the characters, the sets, the props etc. The three departments who are most active here are modeling, rigging and shading. This stage had to be done after we had a storyboard, so we could put more time into the things that will have more screen-time, more closeups, etc., and not waste time on things that were eventually not relevant to the project.
The shot treatment part includes layout, animation, and rendering. All the 3D work that is done per shot as opposed to per asset. Once a basic version of the assets was modeled, we started setting up cameras and compositions per shot and made the layout video board. Then the shots were distributed to the animators. The video board was automatically updated with each progress the animators made. Once the animation was done, each shot was prepared for rendering and then rendered. Render preparations included cloth simulations and effects.

Post production:
After all the render passes of a shot have been rendered and passed QA, they were all integrated and composited. I kept using the in and out of each shot (it's neighboring shots) as color and light reference. When a shot was finished, it was rendered to a 32bit image sequence and to a low quality AVI to update the video board with (the video board was constantly updated with the most recent stage of each shot).
Once all the shots were composited, I put the final sequences in a single composition and did a final color correction pass on them, added film grain, the static noises, and closed other lose ends.

Here's some more general info:


Apps:
Most of our 3D work was done with 3Ds Max 2008 and 2010. We used CAT for character rigging. Models were unwrapped and textured almost exclusively in Unwrella 2.0 and Mudbox 2008/9 respectively. Everything except for some specific render passes was lit, shaded and rendered with Mental Ray. Compositing was done with Eyeon Fusion 5.3.
Personnel:
We had about 5 major players in the production of R6, and another 10 or so guys who worked on it as well. Many of these guys worked out of their own personal hours only. For a full credit list check out the official homepage.
Schedule:
R6 had many personal after-work hours and weekends put into it, as well as internally funded work shifts. The production took about 12 months, out of which half the time was not funded and we worked in our spare time only. With client projects getting priority, these 12 months were spread across slightly more than 18 months altogether.
The Game:
R6 is a trailer for a video game concept we developed, initially for R6, but which eventually got a life of its own. The game, Fragball, is a WIP and is currently still confidential.

Alright, enough for now. Next time I'll get into some details about the art process.