In nuce: Karim Abou Shousha, Senior Lighting Artist at Ubisoft Montreal (for the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Mirage, among others), has now made several tools available for the Unreal Engine, which can be used to draw eye-catching underwater scenes from the pipeline.

In toto: Karim has invested a total of six months to create the tool set called UE5: Underwater Blueprint. The download size is 2.1 gigabytes. In the almost twenty-minute video below, Karim demonstrates how to use his tools.

Click further: UE5: Underwater Blueprint can be downloaded via gumroad.com . Just yesterday, on 22 December 2022, Digital Production reported on another free download; it was a 127-part HDRI library by Grzegorz Wronkowski that was worth reporting to us.

UE5:Underwater Blueprint

The post Create underwater scenes more easily with these free tools! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Saeed Ghorbani, researcher at Ubisoft Toronto, published an almost six-minute video on YouTube on 19 September this year showing ZeroEGGS – a neural network that helps to create voice-controlled gestures. The research project is being developed in collaboration with Ubisoft La Forge and York University.

ZeroEGGS: Zero-shot Example-based Gesture Generation from Speech

In toto: According to the description, ZeroEWGGS requires two things to generate a realistic-looking movement: a verbal prompt and an exemplary moving image of the desired movement. Thanks to these two ingredients, lifelike full-body movements should be created. According to the Ubisoft research team, ZeroEWGGS surpasses previous techniques. The highlight: with the same input, ZeroEWGGS generates several outputs at the same time – i.e. different movements.

Researchers: The video lists Ubisoft La Forge and York University, the research institutions involved. In addition to Saeed Ghorbani, the researchers involved are listed as follows: Ylva Ferstl (research and development scientist), Daniel Holden (researcher on animation and machine learning), Nikolaus F. Troje (Chair for Reality Research at York University) and Marc-André Carbonneau (researcher on machine learning).

Click further: The paper entitled “ZeroEGGS: Zero-shot Example-based Gesture Generation from Speech” is available on the corresponding page on github.com . Digital Production last reported on the research activities of Ubisoft LaForge on 30 March this year. At that time, it was a tool for creature rigging, which makes it possible to record the movement sequences of animal characters – without any motion capturing.

Source: 80.lv ( News from Theodore McKenzie)

The post Creating realistic motion sequences with machine learning? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

While the first part was widely advertised, the story and realisation of Assassin’s Creed II already had a loyal following. In contrast to the first instalment, Ubisoft Montreal, the development studio behind Assassin’s Creed II, this time added HumanIK as middleware to give the characters more room for manoeuvre. The AI module has also been further improved. But what’s really new about “Assassin’s Creed II”?

The game

The first instalment of “Assassin’s Creed” did the same to the competing titles in 2007 as the title hero did to his victims: The time jump between the near future (2012) and the past (1191) was showered with awards by critics and gamers and sold more than eight million copies. As a result, the sequel is under a lot of pressure – because on the one hand there is the dichotomy between further development on the one hand and the mood of its predecessor on the other. But with the time jump story from 2012, both parts of Assassin’s Creed are firmly linked, at least in terms of content.

In the first part, the main character, a bartender named Desmond Miles, fell victim to the machinations of a pharmaceutical company that tested a “genetic memory” machine on him. With this, he steps into the shoes of his ancestors – and ends up in the role of Altaïr Ibn La-Ahad, an assassin in the year 1191. In the second part, Desmond escapes the pharmaceutical company, but ends up in the clutches of another machine and lives the life of another ancestor – this time Ezio Auditore da Firenze, also an assassin for hire, who is on a quest for revenge through Renaissance Venice.

The development

The developer Ubisoft has once again opted for products from Autodesk – and realised a large part of the development with 3ds Max and Motionbuilder, with Human IK as middleware.

“From the beginning, we just wanted to refine and develop Assassin’s Creed,” says James Therien, Head of Programming at Ubisoft Montreal. “Even with such a successful game, we have to keep refining – better characters, better interaction and a story that keeps the tension going. We also need to further develop the game controls, for example in terms of muscles and acrobatic skills in combat,” continues Therien.

“One of the most important aspects for Assassin’s Creed II, in our opinion, was a more realistic hero. The player gains experience in climbing, fighting and flying, but also in dealing with the environment. Autodesk HumanIK helped us with the development of the climbing. We were able to create new and better movements through a fast repetitive process without worrying about the quality of the inverse kinematics.

When it came to jittering, i.e. when the figures started to flutter, we used to waste a lot of time optimising the compression. But HumanIK didn’t generate any of this jittering,” says Therien.

Artificial intelligence

The non-player characters (NPC) are another new development. Therien comments: “In the first part, the other characters only followed you. In the second part, they also approach the player, which requires much more precise animations. HumanIK was incredibly helpful in that, for example, the feet are always on the ground, the arms don’t shake or flicker or anything like that. This also benefited our cutscenes. We were able to compress the same animations more without any loss of quality.” Therien explains that all characters and meshes were generated using Autodesk software packages. The motion capture data was filtered through the motion builder.

The first expansion for Assassin’s Creed II, “Purgatory of the Vanities”, has already been released and is available to download. In this expansion, the player joins an alliance to free Venice from the clutches of the monk Savonarola. Ten new missions or memories await the player here and they meet one of the most memorable characters of the time, Niccoló Machiavelli. Other parts – such as the continuation of the story in “Brotherhood”, a multiplayer mode and another extra story called “The Battle of Forli” – were also well received by the community. Over nine million copies of Assassin’s Creed II have been sold since its launch. So the team from Montreal seems to have done everything right this time too.

Digic Pictures: Opening credits for the review

After the success of the first instalment of Assassin’s Creed, expectations for Part 2 were high – and fans don’t want to be disappointed. The developer studio Digic Pictures has taken up this challenge and produced the game trailer for the game. Digic comes from the gamer corner, as a former division of the game developer Black Hole. The company was spun off from this developer following the success of its own projects. According to the managing director, there were some stumbling blocks in the “most challenging work to date” – including the cloth simulation for dancing people, an enormous amount of matte paintings and missing motion capture data. In terms of workflow, Digic focused on the earliest possible complete version of the film after the storyboard, which was then rendered again and again – after the characters, motion capturing and backgrounds, the first version was output. Other parts such as lighting and textures were added gradually. The main software environments used by Digic are Maya, ZBrush, Photoshop, Bodypaint, Nuke and mental ray.

The post Medieval murderer first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mirja Fürst.

In nuce: Ubisoft recently unveiled the so-called “ZooBuilder” via social networks. This is a tool that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to recreate the basic skeletal structure of animals. All of this works on the basis of moving images that the user feeds into the tool. “ZooBuilder” is designed to help animators create character rigs. However, artists still have to fine-tune the resulting rig afterwards so that the movement sequences of animated animal characters look believable.

How does this work? The three-minute video below, called “ZooBuilder – A Machine Learning Prototype”, takes a closer look at this fascinating new tool. In the video, Abassin Sourou Fangbemi, data scientist at Ubisoft La Forge, explains the advantages of the tool as follows: “Imagine you wanted to record the movements of a lion or a tiger – you would have to take these dangerous animals to a motion capture studio. That would be quite a challenge.” according to Abassin, “ZooBilder” will now dispense with MoCap and rely on machine learning and AI instead. This should make it easier to digitise the movement sequences of animals.

Who invented it? The “ZooBuilder” was developed by Ubisoft La Forge. This is a branch of Ubisoft based in Canada, which is dedicated to the development of new technologies – always with the help of the latest results from academic research organisations.

Click further: You can find out which technological developments Ubisoft LaForge continues to drive on the corresponding website.

The post Ubisoft tool makes creature rigging easier first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

In this making-of for the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla advert, you will not only learn how Vikings made history, but also how motion capture, a coastal battle and the poppy breaking of the fourth wall make for a web clip worth watching. Entertainment value guaranteed!

Behind The Scenes by Goodbye Kansas

ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLA – CINEMATIC TV COMMERCIAL

The post Assassin’s Creed Valhalla | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.