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Beyond Machinima: Rudy Poat and John Gaeta on the Future of Interactive Cinema
RP: It's a bunch of third party tools with a bunch of proprietary stuff that we've created, like the way we do shaders, cameras and lighting. The engine is always changing and evolving. Right now we have a bunch of engineers working on a new foundation. That movie was our first test, so now we're rebuilding it from the ground up. GS: Streamlining? RP: Right. GS: I read that you're utilizing artificial intelligence for interaction. Is that from an artificial intelligence programming level, how lighting reacts or what? RP: It's actually game artificial intelligence (AI) building and we're utilizing pieces of a game engine. So, we try to make things smart. If we're making a real time film, we want secondary characters to know when to move out of the way. In the case of Trapped Ashes, we have lots of little particles that float around, we want those particles to move out of the way. We want things to be smart enough to do things on their own, like a game, so we use game technology to drive all this secondary animation.
We want to build a system where we could make something think. For instance, say we make a television show that has twelve episodes. We actually want to build living sets, where a collaborative film team can go on set and record the data in real time. You can have lighters and animators in there. You can also do pre-production where producers and directors can sit around in live chat and play. They can block out where the stuff should be. At the same time, we want this living set with all sorts of AI embedded into things. Where everything looks good, no matter where we take the camera, because the camera knows what looks good. Using neural networks, we can teach the camera to be smarter about what looks good. This way we can start having inexperienced people making episodes and films. They can go in there and start moving the camera around. The secondary characters move out of the way, the lights come on when someone enters the room. Simple things like that. If the whole place is alive and animated with these rules, then you have a way to make content very cheaply. |
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