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How this short film was a test bed for rigging and stylization tools, and new real-time compositing in Unreal Engine

Watch and learn from ‘Little Bird’.

This week on the befores & afters podcast, we’re chatting to writer and director Chris Perry about his short film Little Bird.

What makes this short particularly interesting is its use of a number of bespoke tools for rigging characters, and for crafting a stylized look and feel in Unreal Engine. These were developed in conjunction with animator, technical director and filmmaker Raf Anzovin.

One tool made for the production is actually called Little Bird. It enables real-time multi-pass rendering and compositing in-engine. You’ll hear Chris talk about how it was built on top of Unreal’s own compositing plugin Composure.

We also discuss, in depth, the rigging tools Chris has been involved with, including ephemeral character manipulation tools.

This episode is brought to you by The Captury. The Captury offers state-of-the-art markerless motion capture technology for your visual effects requirements. With The Captury, you can capture full-body motion, finger poses, and facial expressions without any preparation needed for your actors or the scene. Simply set up a few tracked or static cameras, and you’re good to go. You can either stream low-latency motion into your preferred engine or save the data to disk for use in your VFX pipeline.

Listen to the podcast, and check out the short and a whole bunch of making-ofs, below.


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