How Game Engine Tech Powers These Hilarious Digital Puppets
Felt That: Boxing was a surprise hit at this year's Summer Game Fest. Its creators at San Strings Studio explain the surprising tech stack behind the game's stunning visuals.
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There were a reported 50 million livestreams1 of this year’s Summer Game Fest. And of all the game’s revealed at the show, one stood out and captured players’ imaginations with the absurdity of its premise and the realism of its visuals.
The puppets in Felt That: Boxing look live-action, but they’re purely digital.
“Genuinely one of the most visually impressive games I've ever seen,” wrote one Reddit-user in response to the trailer (embedded below). Within days of its reveal, the game had earned over 100,000 wishlists on Steam.
Not Just a Game
The realistic fur, physics, and lighting in Felt That is all possible thanks to a combination of techniques developed by San Strings Studio—one of the startups set to join the class off SR005 when it kicks off in July.
Sébastien Deguy, cofounder and CEO at San Strings Studio, calls it “a full end-to-end pipeline for creating animation in a novel way.”
“Everything is real-time,” Deguy says. “It’s powered by procedural techniques, and leverages physics and rendering tools available in Unreal Engine.”
This means that the digital puppets that San Strings Studio creates can be manipulated—and animated—with no delay between input and output. “You can create a lot of content very quickly,” Deguy says, “and there’s also no barrier between the artist and the character they’re controlling, which allows for a lot more expressiveness.”
Below, you can see Robot Chicken co-creator Seth Green demonstrating this using a pair of Valve’s Index controllers to control a San Strings Studio puppet:
In typical Hollywood animation pipelines, voice actors and animators are separated by enormous barriers across time and space. But with the system developed by San Strings Studio, the feedback loop is immediate. “For an actor or a performer,” Deguy says, “it gives them the ability to play with details and small movements, the little subtle things that make it suddenly funny or deep. You can iterate very quickly, and adjust the camera or the positioning without asking an operator to do it for you.”
You can also record and see the final render in real-time as you create it. Whereas a half-hour of linear video content could take weeks to produce using traditional processes, San Strings Studio could theoretically do it all in a single half-hour shot.
The San Strings Studio team has been experimenting with linear content in this style already. Their hit YouTube series, Gleeful Beasts, is a hilarious and irregular series of nature-documentary-style videos starring absurd creatures.
Ryan Corniel, cofounder and creative lead at San Strings Studio, says he’s been creating the Gleeful Beasts videos partly for fun, and partly to experiment with the team’s pipeline. “Mainly, I design in ZBrush to create characters,” Corniel says, “and then I make the hair and grooms inside of Houdini. All that goes back into Unreal Engine. And then Unreal handles the hair simulation and lets us animate it all live.”
To animate the puppets, Corniel prefers using the motion controllers that come paired with Valve’s Index VR headset. The end result is uncannily realistic.
“With puppets, there’s just so much weird stuff you can get away with,” Corniel says. “They can jerk around in these ridiculous ways, and the movement of the hair really sells it.”
Sébastien Deguy points out that because all of Corniel’s characters live in Unreal Engine, the assets themselves have cross-media flexibility: the same digital puppet can transition effortlessly from animation to a video game. “Just give access to the controls to somebody, and it becomes a game,” he says.
Furry Ambitions
Fresh off of the hype of Felt That: Boxing’s debut, San Strings Studio is already plotting its next moves. The team is working with Seth Green’s Stoopid Buddy Stoodios on a TV series, and the team says other plans of their tech—for both shows and movies—are in the works.
In the meantime, their work on Felt That takes precedence, and the team has plans to release video content featuring the characters leading up to the launch of the game. For now, Deguy says, the team is focused on scaling up the team to support Corniel’s vision on the game and their first TV show.
“We’re planning to accelerate from there,” Deguy says, so the team is looking to connect with additional investors between now and their debut at SR005 Demo Day in October.
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