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28 cgw j a n • f e b • m a r c h 2 0 2 1 My-Makers A Claic wh a Modern Twist Baobab presents the tale in a storybook- style fashion, giving the 3D imagery a stagecra – handcraed and theatrical – feel. "We're giving you that experience you had as a child looking at a fairy tale in a book, but now you can actually go into the book and into that fairy-tale world, and not only stand in it, but be a part of the story," Darnell explains. The framework of Baba Yaga is based on the literary construct of presenting a prologue, epilogue, and chapter headings in between scenes. Those interstitials are narrated by Baba Yaga herself, giving the viewer an understanding of how the story is progressing, what transitions are happening, and which personality the witch embodies. As Darnell points out, people are familiar with chapter headers in books, so it's easier for them to make that leap into a storybook world such as this. Technically, it also allows for easy set swaps on the mobile VR platform as well as properly orients the viewer for upcoming scenes. Meanwhile, the storybook prologue sets the stage for the experience, explaining how the humans settlers began challenging the power of nature, prompting the protector of the forest, Baba Yaga, to cast the spell on the chief. According to Larry Cutler, Baobab co-founder and CTO, the prologue and ep- ilogue from the start were designed to look like a 360-degree pop-up storybook with 2D cutouts craed by production designer Glenn Hernandez and animated by Ken Fountain, supervising animator. "You are in the middle of this 2D world that is supposed to be flat, but it also has depth. So, it has to work in 3D," says production designer Matthieu Saghezchi. Seing e Stage The overall aesthetic is an infusion of illus- trative 2D pop-up animation, hand-drawn, and stop-motion styles, although craed in CGI. As a bonus, this design conceit meshed well with the constraints of having to run on an Oculus Quest: The filmmakers are telling a story whose content is rendered in real time at 72 fps on what amounts to a mobile phone chipset on the Quest. "It's very easy to have complexity for complexity's sake, especially in CG because you've got volumes and you've got the reaction to light and all these things we love to see. To consciously step away from that, though, is an interesting artistic and even technical challenge. And there's certainly a technical advantage to keeping things sim- ple; you are always looking at how to get as much data as you can through that relatively tiny pipe," says Darnell. Using the stage language of the story, small islands of content pop in and out of the light as the story unfolds, as opposed to having large, open environments that the player navigates through. Since technical limitations prevent dynamic lighting in VR, most of it was baked into the textures, and then the individual materials were animated to transition from one lighting scenario to the next. So when the lighting changes, the scene switches from one set to another. A large part of the story takes place in the forest, which is a mixture of both 3D and 2D elements, with a complicated set of 2D cutouts representing the trees. The forest, which is very dark, comprises complex layers involving 20 lighting transitions and blended lighting setups (over 40 different ones). "As it turned out, that was really hard to do in VR because having different lights that cast shadows is very expensive," explains Cutler. "However, that lighting really added to the fear you feel when you're in the forest, and it also made [the experience] feel like a storybook and a fairy tale." Content was generated procedurally based on the decisions of the player. So, ear- ly on, the script was separated into chunks and coded into behavior trees. Later, the filmmakers moved into a VR storyboarding process whereby the editor and storyboard artist/animator worked inside the Unity game engine where the interactivity was combined with the narrative. The asset creation process, especially the modeling and rigging, was more closely aligned to that of an animated film. The animation has a stop-motion, handcraed style, animated on 2s within Autodesk's Maya, which was used mainly for all the front-end work, including modeling and rigging as well. The assets were then ported over to Unity, where the surfacing and further animation were done, along with lighting, effects, and interactivity. The studio's pipeline includes a number of standard industry soware, along with some proprietary tools, including the all-important non-linear Real-Time Storyteller Platform, which Baobab has been extending signifi- cantly with each subsequent VR project. Built on top of Maya and Unity, Storyteller's initial function was to enable the group to create feature-film-quality characters in VR, but has since expanded to perform other tasks, including cinematography and making the review process more robust. "We have our own unique workflow to take the animation we create in Maya and get it into the game engine in a way that is more expressive than a typical game rig you would have in a typical VR experience," explains Cutler. "Then everything else is done in Unity; there are AI systems for the different characters and interactivity associ- ate with it." The 3D imagery has a stagecra feel, giving it a storybook aesthetic.