This document summarizes the animated short film "Sherman" which was created entirely with Unity. It discusses how the film was blocked out and animated without storyboards. Advanced animation techniques like Alembic were used. Custom fur and visual effects were also implemented. Lighting was achieved through light probes, reflection probes, and baked global illumination. The project structure and Unity's capabilities for film production are discussed, as well as future directions like modular projects and Addressables.

1. Sherman
An animated short film Made with Unity

2. Real-time CG animation in Unity:
unpacking the Sherman project
Mike Wuetherick
Head of Tech
M&E Innovation Group
Unity Technologies
@gekido

3. Topics
Sherman
● Key Stats
● Blocking out the Short
● Lookdev in HDRP
● Camera Layout with Cinemachine
● Advanced animation with Alembic
● Lighting for Linear animation
● Fur & VFX
● Evolution of a Unity Project

5. Sherman – Key Stats
● No storyboards, straight into 3D to ‘find the story’
● Small core team
○ 1 1/2 animators, 1 modeler, 1 graphics engineer, prod
● Unity Technology used:
○ Timeline, Cinemachine, Alembic, HD Render Pipeline, Post Processing, Visual FX Graph,
Shader Graph, Unity Recorder, Progressive Lightmapper, FBX Exporter
● Concept to Final frames with Unity 2018.4
● Fur experimental implementation, designed for ‘Offline Render Quality’

6. On The Shoulders of Giants
Marza Animation Planet + Unity Japan - The Gift
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVHH3-bP-fE

7. Blocking out the Short

8. Blocking out the Short

9. Lookdev with HDRP

10. LookDev with HDRP
High fur quality bar Inspired by Dreamworks - Bilby, Disneyland Commercial

11. LookDev with HDRP
Steven Shmuely - Modeler
● Simple ENV/ low asset count to
ensure Quality
● Characters Modeled in Maya/ 3ds
Max
● Surfaced in Substance Painter
● *Some ENV assets reused from
Book of the Dead*
○ Styled to better fit the film

12. LookDev with HDRP
● Optimizing for Quality, not Performance
● Developed a detail settings system
○ Switch from fast working environment to highest quality rendered output
● Global Post Processing Profile - Overall Color Grading
● CM Shot per shot post controls - Exposure, DoF, Vignette, etc.
● CM Storyboard feature - Splitview to view Visual Target over Rendered Image

13. Steven Shmuely - Lone Modeler
● Rendered turntables in Unity for review
● Most assets use the HD/Lit Shader

14. Custom Materials - ShaderGraph

15. Camera Layout

16. Camera Layout with Cinemachine
Cinemachine used to layout all
cameras
FBX exporter to pull cameras
from Unity to Maya for
Animators
Initially shot wide to allow
Bryan room to explore, CM used
to refine shots

17. Camera Layout with Cinemachine
Experimenting with new cameras via Timeline after Anim complete to push cinematic quality
Combination of CM clips and Animation tracks to animate Cameras - quick exploration

18. Animation

19. Advanced Animation with Alembic
Baymax Dreams used FBX file as primary format for asset transfer, wanted to explore
alternatives
FBX Limitations (at the time)
- Skin weighting limitation prior to Unity 2019.x
- Sherman created with Unity 2018.3 - each vertex weighted to 4 bone maximum
- 2019.x now supports 256 bones/vertex
- Scale Compensation (squash and stretch)

20. Squash and Stretch
Squash and Stretch especially important for
high quality animation
Option:
● Flatten Rig Hierarchy (bag of bones)
Challenge:
● Character is difficult to manage during
previz
Solution : Alembic
*Alembic Package out of preview in 2019.1, now fully supported

21. Alembic Challenges
File Size / Performance
● Each frame of anim is a baked snapshot of the vertex positions for the model. Higher poly
mesh/ Longer animation = Big File size
● On Sherman - character animation data roughly 7Gb ( 12Gb total project size )
● Alembic streams from disk – performance challenges
Attaching Objects
● Attaching Lights/ Reflection probes and CM cameras not easily achieved
● Skeleton data not included by default – possible to export lets you get full skeleton rig –
careful of super heavy nested game object hierarchies!

22. Alembic Challenges
Material Management
● Material Definitions not stored needed to be reassigned with every new export
● Remapping materials with dozens of alembic clips is time consuming
Wrote several tools to simplify - available in the Film/TV Toolbox package

23. USD and the Future
Pixar’s open source USD format
gaining traction with studios & tool
vendors
First version of Unity USD support
available via Package Manager, new
dedicated team!

24. Lighting

25. Lighting Strategies for Linear Content
Lighting Supervisor
- Jean-Philippe (JP) Leroux.
Real Time lighting for Sherman
achieved through:
● Light Probes
● Reflection Probes
● Cascade Shadow Maps
● Baked Global Illumination

26. Global Illumination
Indirect lighting precalculated for high quality localized ambient lighting
- Static objects are marked for lightmapping
- Used progressive lightmapper Baked Indirect

27. Light Probe Array
● Small objects lit dynamically with a probe array
● Larger objects, not lightmapped - more refined probe lighting through Proxy volumes
● Did not bake lights, only the sky and bounce of directional lighting

28. Reflections
Spherical Real-Time reflection probe Planar Real-Time reflection probe

29. Lights
With Probes &
Baked GI – all
lighting is dynamic
Light prefabs with a
pivot offset – easily
orbit objects

32. Fur & VFX

33. Fur & VFX

34. Visual Effects Graph
● Effects Artist :
Vlad Neykov
● Node-based visual effects
tool
● Available in Preview for
HDRP
● GPU-accelerated effects

37. Fur

40. Authored ‘Strand’ patch, baked to SDF

43. Fur in Sherman
● Experimental implementation using 18.4 HDRP
● Shell-based approach
○ Multiple-SDF layers
● Shading uses HDRP ‘Hair’ master node
Future Work:
● Updating tech to 19.x
● Collaboration with Graphics R&D on ‘proper’ Fur implementation
● Authoring / Groom tools in-editor

44. Other Tools & Features

45. Rendering
● Unity Recorder package
● Timeline integration
● Renders at 4k
● Dedicated ‘Render Farm’ of 3 consumer PC’s
● On demand, anyone can remote in to start renders
● Nightly renders for review

46. Filmic Motion Blur/ Super Sampling
● Initially developed for Baymax Dreams final QC
● Super Sampling ‘Offline” renderer
● Also used for final Fur Converge
● Renders at 960 fps (24 fps * 40 samples)
● Final frames @ 4k
○ roughly 5 FPM - full render of the short at max quality in roughly 9 hours
● Future work: stochastic accumulation rendering
● opens possibility for DOF / higher quality super sampled rendering for offline use cases

47. Render Window
● Allowed ‘final quality’ render of frames on demand
● Improved Iteration times for final Fur Groom / Lighting – on-demand
convergence for Fur

48. Sherman – Key Stats
● No storyboards, straight into 3D to ‘find the story’
● Unity Technology used:
○ Timeline, Cinemachine, Alembic, HD Render Pipeline, Post Processing, Visual FX Graph,
Shader Graph, Unity Recorder, Progressive Lightmapper, FBX Exporter
● Concept to Final frames with Unity 2018.4
● Custom Fur implementation, designed for ‘Offline Render Quality’
● Project available (including all custom package) for everyone!

49. Evolution of a Unity project

50. Vestibulum congueAssembly
Content
● 3d models
● Animations
● Textures
● Audio
Code
● Unity packages
● Custom tools
● Workflow utilities
● Internal code libraries
Assembly
● Scenes
● Timeline sequences
● Configuration files
● Build / platform info
Project
Composition

51. ‘Classic’ project structure - pre 2018.x Unity
- Monolithic ‘Unity’ runtime / editor
- Unity project, contains all:
- User code
- Assets
- Configuration info
- Monolithic Unity runtime
Unity Editor
Unity Project
Code Content
Custom
Code
3rd party
tools
Models
Anims
Audio
Textures
Asset
store
content
Unity Runtime
Config
Scenes
Config files
Build info

52. ‘Modern’ project structure - 2018.x Unity
- Modular Unity Editor
- Package-based feature delivery
- Features migrated into c# ‘user
space’ - eg. Scriptable
Renderer
- Unity project, contains all:
- User code
- Assets
- Configuration info
- Modular Unity runtime
- Code stripping of unwanted
features
Unity Editor
Unity Runtime
Package Manager
Modular Runtime
Unity Project
Code Content
Custom
Code
3rd party
tools
Models
Anims
Audio
Textures
Asset
store
content
Config
Scenes
Config files
Build info

53. Unity Editor
Package Manager
Content
Custom Packages
(scoped registries)
‘Near-future’ project structure - 2019.x Unity
- Modular Unity Editor
- Package-based feature delivery
- Features migrated into c# ‘user
space’ - eg. Scriptable Renderer
- Asset store / 3rd party Content
& Code
- Unity project, only contains:
- Configuration info
- Custom user package delivery
- Code
- Content
- Modular Unity runtime
- Code stripping of unwanted
features
Unity Runtime
Modular Runtime
Unity
Project
Code Content
Custom
Code
Models
Anims
Audio
Textures
Asset store content
Config
Scenes
Config files
Build info
Code
Unity features
3rd party tools
Shared
Libraries

54. Episodic Project structure
Unity Editor
Package Manager
Content
Asset store content
Code
Unity features
3rd party tools
Lookdev
Unity Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Episode / Shot
Assembly
Unity Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Custom in-house
Packages
Code Content
Custom
Code
Models
Anims
Audio
Textures
Shared
Libraries

55. Unity for Large-scale productions
Unity Editor
Package Manager
Content
Custom in-house
Packages
Unity
Project
Code Content
Custom
Code
Models
Anims
Audio
Textures
Asset store content
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Code
Unity features
3rd party tools
Shared
Libraries
Unity
Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Unity
Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Unity
Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Unity
Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Unity
Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Unity
Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Unity
Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Episodes (TV Production)
Scenes (feature film)

56. Modular Projects
Advantages
● Explicit versioning of code & assets
● Centralized management
● Access control (Scoped Registries)
● Coordination across multiple projects
○ Multiple scenes / episodes in a TV series or
movie for example
● Integration with asset pipeline tools:
○ Shotgun, FTrack etc
● Common libraries, tools & code across
multiple projects
● Reusable content (asset libraries)
Disadvantages
● No documentation for how to set this up ‘out
of the box’
● Content in ‘package’ format still requires
lengthy import times for first load
○ Cache server can be used to ‘pre-warm’
assets via a build machine
● Limited documentation to setup on-prem /
custom package registry
● 3rd party Registry options (MyGet / GitHub)
● No tooling to easily create custom packages is,
requires advanced technical knowledge

57. Future discussions

58. Addressables & Cloud Projects
- The vast majority (ie almost all) assets are static (are not modified by the
Unity user) during the assembly stage of a project
- Look dev / asset prep occurs with ‘source’ asset, which is published as an addressable asset
- Eliminates the need to ‘warm’ or preload assets for fast project loading
- Assets should be able to be loaded immediately without ‘import’ times
- Needs custom workflow tooling to implement currently

59. Addressables Architecture
Lookdev Unity
Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build info
Episode / Shot
Unity Project
Config
Scenes (?)
Config files
Build infoAddressable Content
Hosting Service
Asset Database
Artists publish
asset versions to
Asset Database
Episode /
Assembly project
references latest
approved version
of asset

60. For more info
● Sherman Blog (2-part):
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/06/11/introducing-
sherman-part-1/
● Unity Film Solutions Page:
https://unity.com/solutions/film-animation-cinematics
● Other Unity Demos / Examples:
https://unity3d.com/unity/demos
● Made with Unity:
www.unity.com/madewith
Unity for Look Development: https://youtu.be/urew479-Wlw
Unity for Lighting & Compositing: https://youtu.be/0H3TUnUfAIU
Unity for Layout: https://youtu.be/qZEXIXYOcoM

61. Thank you!
Mike Wuetherick
Head of Tech
M&E Innovation Group
Unity Technologies
@gekido