Courtesy of Steamroller Animation
The spark of an idea can come from the most unlikely of places. For Jalil Sadool, Chief Creative Officer at Steamroller Animation, it was Anthony Bourdain’s culinary adventures in the TV series Parts Unknown.
Sadool got to thinking: What if Bourdain was on the ship of the Star Trek Enterprise, and his gourmet journeys were intergalactic rather than global?
That wild speculation resulted in the premise driving one of the most innovative—and successful—short films of the past few years.
Sadool got to thinking: What if Bourdain was on the ship of the Star Trek Enterprise, and his gourmet journeys were intergalactic rather than global?
That wild speculation resulted in the premise driving one of the most innovative—and successful—short films of the past few years.
Spice Frontier is an eight-minute animation that won 35 awards on the short film circuit in 2019. With the film’s success, Steamroller has produced a MegaGrant-supported full-length pilot episode for a show based on the original idea, slated for release on YouTube.
To promote the IP, they’re launching a UEFN-built Fortnite island the same day Episode 1 releases.
We caught up with the team to explore how they managed to create the 80s-cartoon-inspired 2D aesthetic of Spice Frontier in Unreal Engine—and how taking the leap into real-time technology saw Spice Frontier voyage into the metaverse.
To promote the IP, they’re launching a UEFN-built Fortnite island the same day Episode 1 releases.
We caught up with the team to explore how they managed to create the 80s-cartoon-inspired 2D aesthetic of Spice Frontier in Unreal Engine—and how taking the leap into real-time technology saw Spice Frontier voyage into the metaverse.
Courtesy of Steamroller Animation
Proving out a 2D aesthetic in a 3D engine
Spice Frontier is the tale of Kent, a space-faring chef who explores the universe looking for spices to resurrect Earth’s cuisine.The look and feel of the show was influenced by the team’s love for 80s Saturday morning cartoons, mimicking the retro style of highly graphic cell shaded characters combined with a painterly background.
While the look was grounded in a classic 2D style, Steamroller had an innovative notion of how they would produce the show: they would join a growing number of animation studios turning to game engines for more creative freedom and flexibility.
Sadool was enthused by the prospect of producing animation with faster, more collaborative, more iterative real-time workflows.
But he had a niggling doubt: would the advantages of the new pipeline outweigh the cost of replacing their existing one? And would they even be able to achieve the 2D look they needed in a 3D engine?
To mitigate some of these concerns, Sadool decided on a cautious approach—the team would use their traditional pipeline to create a single shot that demonstrated their desired 2D look. Then, a small part of the crew would attempt to recreate that shot like-for-like in Unreal Engine, testing their ability to match their desired 2D aesthetic in a 3D environment.
If they couldn’t tell which shot was which, it would be a success. Three months later, that offshoot team returned with something to show. “When they came back, honestly, I couldn't tell the difference,” Sadool says. “It was amazing.”
Courtesy of Steamroller Animation
Techniques for achieving 2D visuals in a game engine
During the three-month period over which the breakaway team was experimenting in Unreal Engine, the team was really trying to solve one specific challenge. Adam Meyer, Co-founder and Head of Art Department at Steamroller Animation, articulates it neatly.“The inspirations are old Disney features or Dom Bluth cartoons—they were all 2D,” he explains. “So how do you get a 2D look in 3D?”
The answer came in a series of breakthroughs as the team explored all the ways a 3D engine could be used to achieve a 2D style.
To nail the aesthetic of the backgrounds, the team used 2D hand-animated multiplane effects, which enabled them to create the illusion of depth by moving different layers of artwork at different speeds during a shot.
They had a similarly innovative approach when it came to achieving the right look for the characters, forgoing lighting and removing shadow and detail to maintain a 2D style.
A custom-built offset rimlight tool enabled the artists to produce an edge of light around the character’s silhouette, highlighting their shape and contours and separating them from the background.
“Essentially, what we're doing there is mimicking the old techniques of a very graphic, cel shaded character and a more painterly background,” says Josh Carroll, Head Of Creative at Steamroller Animation.
Courtesy of Steamroller Animation
Reaping real-time benefits for animation
The team soon discovered ways to combine their 2D techniques with powerful 3D workflows. A case in point is the way in which they iterated on the shot backgrounds.“As opposed to painting all the backgrounds in 2D, we're able to quickly scout locations, change camera angles—and it's not a redraw,” says Meyer. “We can just move the camera and get our cool 2D background without having to redo everything.”
In fact, this ability to make changes instantly had a profound effect on the entire production.
When working in a traditional animation pipeline—particularly at the beginning of a project—teams have to make creative decisions without having the context of the final lighting and backgrounds.
Unreal Engine flipped this on its head—working in the final environment, the artists could see exactly how their animation would interplay with lighting and scene elements.
“With the traditional pipeline, it was difficult and costly to go back,” recalls Sadool. “But using Unreal, we were able to very quickly—within a day— get different versions. That allowed us to be more creative.”
Courtesy of Steamroller Animation
When crunch time hits in traditional animation pipelines, that’s it—you’re done. If the director has a last-minute creative brainwave, it’s just too bad—long render times using offline renderers means it’s generally not possible to accommodate the idea and also hit the deadline.
Working in a real-time engine means any aspect of the scene can be adjusted, right up until the last moment.
“It's push render and you get your image,” says Carroll. “Animation, effects, environment build, shaders—all those can really be tweaked at any point in the process.”
Steamroller also found that working in a game engine breaks away from the traditional, linear animation process. In its place is a much more synergistic workflow, with teams working together in a single, constantly live environment.
“For me, the biggest benefit of working in Unreal in this real time environment is the collaboration of the whole thing,” says Meyer. “Traditionally, you just go in order from one department to the other. No one's really talking to each other. And that's at odds with what makes good creative work.”
With those barriers broken down, artists can work together at the same time and see how their work impacts that of others. It also gives individual artists much more agency in the whole animation process.
“Now all of a sudden, artists who might have handed off to another department and have no more say, they're now part of the process all the way through to the end,” says Meyer.
Working in a real-time engine means any aspect of the scene can be adjusted, right up until the last moment.
“It's push render and you get your image,” says Carroll. “Animation, effects, environment build, shaders—all those can really be tweaked at any point in the process.”
Steamroller also found that working in a game engine breaks away from the traditional, linear animation process. In its place is a much more synergistic workflow, with teams working together in a single, constantly live environment.
“For me, the biggest benefit of working in Unreal in this real time environment is the collaboration of the whole thing,” says Meyer. “Traditionally, you just go in order from one department to the other. No one's really talking to each other. And that's at odds with what makes good creative work.”
With those barriers broken down, artists can work together at the same time and see how their work impacts that of others. It also gives individual artists much more agency in the whole animation process.
“Now all of a sudden, artists who might have handed off to another department and have no more say, they're now part of the process all the way through to the end,” says Meyer.
Courtesy of Steamroller Animation
Expanding the story universe with UEFN
While game development is in Steamroller’s DNA—their first project was a video game—what the studio is really about is storytelling. Of particular interest to them are stories that transcend platforms.“From film to game to TV show, we want the universes we create to live in a variety of mediums,” says Carroll. “We think the audience would love to experience more adventures in different contexts.”
This transmedia mindset saw them spot an opportunity right at the beginning of work on the Spice Frontier project: to blend together the worlds of gaming and animation. “Early on, we decided to leverage UEFN as a testbed to reuse assets and storytelling from the film in a game context,” says Carroll.
The team would take the assets and worldbuilding they had done in Unreal Engine for the animated show, and import that to Unreal Editor for Fortnite, where they would create a spin-off game based on the IP.
Courtesy of Steamroller Animation
“The great thing about UEFN is that it works with all the assets that we created in Unreal,” says Meyer. “We can take assets that we created for the pilot episode and one-to-one bring them into UEFN—and they look the same in the game as they did in the episode.”
The result is ‘Spice Frontier: Cosmic Rush’—a Fortnite island that pits two teams against each other in a race for the planet Valtegar’s most valuable mineral, qui’la.
The experience gives fans of Spice Frontier that chance to further explore the universe of the story from an immersive, first-person perspective.
In delighting audiences with a combined package of animation and game, Steamroller is tapping into the creative motivation that drives them: telling great stories.
“Steamroller Animation has always been really forward thinking,” says Carroll. “Unreal presented an opportunity to move our technology forward while expanding our capability in storytelling.”
The result is ‘Spice Frontier: Cosmic Rush’—a Fortnite island that pits two teams against each other in a race for the planet Valtegar’s most valuable mineral, qui’la.
The experience gives fans of Spice Frontier that chance to further explore the universe of the story from an immersive, first-person perspective.
In delighting audiences with a combined package of animation and game, Steamroller is tapping into the creative motivation that drives them: telling great stories.
“Steamroller Animation has always been really forward thinking,” says Carroll. “Unreal presented an opportunity to move our technology forward while expanding our capability in storytelling.”