Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series of stories taking an in-depth look at the state of the videogame industry in the Triangle.

CARY, N.C. – When it came time for Stan Lee and the NHL to create a brand new team of super heroes, they looked no further than Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 technology to power the new franchise.

The Guardian Project is a transmedia franchise featuring 30 new super heroes, each one built using the same Unreal technology that powers the newly released Bulletstorm and Epic’s Gears of War franchise. While best known to the public for its games, Epic has established a presence across much of the industry – from platforms to publishers – with the Unreal engine that it licenses.

The characters made their debut in a short film that blended CGI with live action at the RBC Center in Raleigh, – home of the Carolina Hurricanes – during the recent 58th NHL All-Star Game.

The film was shown inside the Hurricanes home arena and also aired on Versus and CBC Networks. Next up for the characters is an online video game to launch this October in tandem with the face-off of the 2011-2012 NHL season.

A computer-animated TV show is also in the works, along with a variety of merchandising and other collectibles, some of which are already for sale at The Eye stores locally.

Additionally, throughout the NHL All-Star Fan Fair at the Raleigh Convention Center, Vicon House of Moves (HOM) had a booth that allowed attendees to see some of the super heroes up close and personal using virtual reality glasses that highlighted the details in these Unreal-created digital Guardians. The booth was set up like a small motion-capture set, complete with red lights.

“Guardians are a group of superheroes…the creation of Mike Mason,” explained Tony Chargin, co-creator of The Guardian Project and executive vice president of Guardian Media Entertainment (GME). “Through a fantastic event they come to life and they have to help Mason fight the forces of evil. Deven Dark is the villain in the debut film and the Carolina Hurricane ends up saving the day.”

Multiple reasons to pick Unreal

This massive undertaking was the result of a consortium of companies and technicians. GME is a joint venture between the NHL and SLG Entertainment led by Marvel comics legend Stan Lee of POW! Entertainment. GME enlisted HOM to work with its internal team of programmers and technicians to create these super heroes from the ground up, virtually, employing the latest performance capture technology to ensure these digital creations could be transported across media.

“We chose Unreal specifically for ease of use,” said Peter Krygowski, director of the project at HOM. “The learning curve to ramp up a production and fit it into our pipeline was quite minimal.”

Krygowski explained that using Unreal evolved for two reasons. The first, House of Moves is first and foremost a motion capture and animation house that doesn’t have a huge infrastructure to handle rendering that one needs for traditional, high-end output.

“Secondly, I have been in and around the video game world for close to 12 years,” said Krygowski. “I have had the great fortune work with quite a few different proprietary engines, tweaking each to deliver cinemas (in-game and marketing), ads, front-ends, and all sorts of assets. This familiarity, with game engines, their power, tweakability, their real-time feedback, seemed to synchronize perfectly with the size of The Guardian Project as well as its aggressive delivery schedule, which required 250 deliverables in a short amount of time.”

HOM captured stunts and poses for each of the 30 Guardian superheroes at their 26,000 square feet of motion capture stages equipped with more than 200 Vicon T160 cameras over nine days of mo-cap shooting. The project was completed over six months with a team of creatives that started at 10 and grew to 200 at the project’s peak.

“I can’t really emphasize enough, how impactful Unreal was/is to this particular project,” said Krygowski. “The real-time lighting, ease of use, the ability to iterate quickly, and finally near-time rendering of final assets, allowed us to really accelerate (compared to more traditional strategies) an already compressed delivery schedule for a whole host of deliverables. For instance, at the NHL All Star game; we needed to deliver what eventually would become a three-and-a-half minute animated short in two-and-a-half months from the ground up. This is a project that normally would have taken six months to produce.”

Flexibility boosts project at crucial time

HOM ran into an emergency situation just 48 hour before the premiere of the short film at NHL All-Star when an outside vendor delivered six shots that did not fit with the rest of the video. Thanks to Unreal, HOM was able to revise, re-animate, and re-render the shots. Because of the flexibility of the pipeline, the team was able to make the changes, add/change animation, pass it through Unreal and get the final animation composited in time for the final piece. Krygowski said without Unreal, this would not even have been an option.

In the future HOM aims to tie the Unreal Engine to the Vicon motion capture system so that clients will be able to see their recorded mo-cap performances integrated into game levels rendered in the game engine in real-time. The eventual near-term goal is to weave real-time environments with real-time capture to enhance and accelerate a whole host of issues along a given production pipeline from instant pre-visualization to expedited offline editing

“On a project like this, you have to think down the road of potentially extrapolating characters and environments into game assets, a television series—and flowing the CG creative elements between mediums,” said Brian Rausch, vice president of production, HOM. “By building scenes in a game engine out of the gates, our options are much broader—the need to down-res files from broadcast to game, for example, will be mitigated.”

In the near future, Krygowski believes more Hollywood productions will incorporate Unreal into their pipelines because the technology allows for a collapsed production time (if need be) while still allowing for robust iteration. And, because of the share- ability of assets between game and broadcast mediums, there is a significant potential savings in man hours required to adjust assets to suit the medium. And finally, because of the cross pollination, whole new ways of viewing and playing with an IP such as The Guardian Project are wide open.

Triangle Game 2011: The series

Epic president talks about his company and RTP’s growing games sector.

Designing Bulletstorm – with a woman’s point of view, too.

Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski defends Bulletstorm, Epic’s latest release.

Other Triangle studios have big plans for 2011.

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