Hasta La Motion!

Considered as one of the biggest blockbuster of the year, Disney’s Mulan has been delayed because of the coronavirus. Other upcoming releases that have been postponed are New Mutants and Antlers.

Niki Caro, the director of Mulan, posted a message on her Instagram account about the postponement of the film.

Dear Mulan Fans,

Making this film has been one of the most satisfying and exhilarating experiences of my entire career, and I’ve been so fortunate to be on this journey with some of the best cast and crew in the business – people who truly embody the attributes of Loyal, Brave, and True. We are so excited to share this film with the world, but given the current ever-shifting circumstances we are all experiencing, unfortunately, we have to postpone the worldwide release of MULAN for now. Our hearts are with everyone the world over who is affected by this virus, and we hope that Mulan’s fighting spirit will continue to inspire those who are working so hard to keep us all safe. Thank you for all of your enthusiasm and support, and I can’t wait for the day where we will all get to experience this tale of a girl warrior who became a legend together

With love,
Niki Caro

The film, a live-action remake of the popular 1998 animated film about a Chinese female warrior, was set to debut in North America on 27 March.

Disney’s rescheduling of Mulan came after the company announced it was closing Disneyland because of the outbreak. Disneyland Paris, where a park maintenance worker has tested positive for coronavirus, will also close this weekend. Disney’s four theme parks in Asia are already closed and will remain closed until at least the end of March.

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Disney Pixar’s new animated feature, Soul which will be coming out this year, releases its new trailer. Soul will feature Pixar’s first black lead. Starring Jamie Foxx, the movie is based around Joe Gardner, a jazz musician and music teacher, whose soul suddenly leaves his body. The euphemism symbolises death, and explores the great beyond.

The movie which is directed by Pete Docter who is known to have released successful movies in the past, including Up and Inside Out, is expected to do well at the box office and various festivals.

The trailer shows Foxx’s character in the movie wants to come back to life as he has one undone deed left to be completed on Earth before he is ready to die. Because just before Joe Gardner feel into the manhole, he actually got himself a chance to perform jazz on stage. However, things are not as easy as they seem because the souls can’t just escape out of the soul world. One can see Joe taking the help of Tina Fey’s character called 22 to escape out of the soul world.

Apart from Fey and Foxx, the movie also casts Questlove, Phylicia Rashad, and Daveed Diggs, among many others. Soul is set to hit the theatres on 19 June 2020.

The post Jamie Foxx to lend voice to Pixar’s first black lead appeared first on AnimationXpress.

A new Witcher game is set to be in development once Cyberpunk 2077 launches, CD Projekt president Adam Kiciński has revealed.

Kiciński informed a pack of journalists (via Eurogamer Poland/PSU) that a “relatively clear concept” has already been frozen for the next entry in the Witcher series, but that full production would begin “immediately” after Cyberpunk 2077 releases in the market.

The Witcher 3 is one of the most successful RPGs of the current console generation, having just recently been moved to the Switch and updated with PC cross-save and enhanced visuals.

Cyberpunk 2077 was recently rescheduled until September, so it seems like we can expect the next Witcher game to begin development soon.

As per reports, the new Witcher game won’t be a direct sequel to 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and won’t be called The Witcher 4. Kiciński also added that every game the Polish studio currently has planned will be based in either the Witcher or Cyberpunk universe. A smaller team from within the studio is being resourced for development on the new Witcher game.

Not much was revealed were provided on the next Witcher game, except that it will be “embedded” into The Witcher franchise.

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The NAB Show gets cancelled considering the coronavirus concerns. NAB Show president and CEO Gordon H. Smith addressed the NAB Show community stating:

“As you know, we have been carefully monitoring coronavirus developments both domestically and globally over the past few weeks.

In the interest of addressing the health and safety concerns of our stakeholders and in consultation with partners throughout the media and entertainment industry, we have decided not to move forward with NAB Show in April. We are currently considering a number of potential alternatives to create the best possible experience for our community.

This was not an easy decision. Fortunately, we did not have to make this decision alone, and are grateful to our NAB Show community for engaging with us as we grappled with the rapidly-evolving situation. This Show is as much yours as it is ours, and it is important to us that we move forward together.

For nearly 100 years, NAB Show has provided superior value and the best possible experience for exhibitors and attendees. We knew that if we could not deliver on those expectations, we would not move forward. More importantly, keeping the community safe and healthy is NAB’s highest priority; therefore, we are deferring to the developing consensus from public health authorities on the challenges posed by coronavirus.

We are still weighing the best potential path forward, and we ask you for your patience as we do so. We are committed to exploring all possible alternatives so that we can provide a productive setting where the industry can engage with the latest technology, hear from industry thought leaders and make the game-changing connections that drive our industry forward.

I want to stress that despite our disappointment at how this year’s Show has been impacted by global public health concerns, we are more excited than ever about the future of NAB Show and our relationship with you.

We are grateful for each and every member of our Show community. It is your passion for the industry that makes NAB Show a success year after year, and it is that same passion that will drive us into the future as we look ahead to new possibilities later this year and beyond.”

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Hyderabad based gaming studio, BornMonkie will be launching their game Auto Raja on the MPL platform next month.

For designing the photo-realistic element they have traveled to places to click real-life pictures as a reference to create the realistic-looking computer-generated environment, objects for the game. From Charminar to food carts, to ice cream carts, it has it all! In conversation with Animationxpress BornMonkie VP J Pavan Kumar Reddy who works as a 3D artist and as a game designer says, “We went to shoot the locations of the old city, Hyderabad and collected references of local buildings, props to make the environment look closer to Indian style. Gathering all the references and info we moved to the next step which is modeling them all.”

They have shared their workflow of how they have designed the game. The steps that they  kept in mind while designing the game are as follows:

• Laying out the large-scale features of the map, for players and enemies to move around in.
• Determining environmental conditions and ‘ground rules’ such as scoring systems, allowable weapons or gameplay types, time limits, and starting resources.
• Specifying certain regions where certain gameplay activities or behaviours occur.
• Specifying non-static parts of a level, such as and buttons with associated mechanisms, Specifying locations of various entities, such as player units, enemies, monster spawn points, resource nodes, weapons, save points, and so on;
• Specifying the start and exit locations for one or more players;
• Adding aesthetic details such as level-specific graphic textures, sounds, animation, lighting, and music;
• Introducing scripted event locations, where certain actions by the player can trigger specified changes;
• Placing the pathfinding nodes.

Here are the workflows of the two crucial design elements which has added more photo-realistic touch design-wise to the game:

Creation of the ‘the auto’: Auto or tuk-tuk was one of the prime elements of the design process and thus the team has taken time to work on photorealistic Indian Tuk Tuks/auto. To create it they were in need of a lot of skins as those were to be used for monetization in the game, as per the freemium game style. For auto or tuk-tuk they:

• First, they have modeled the auto on low poly mesh and a high poly mesh in Blender.
• They have brought it on the high poly mesh into Substance painter to generate all the different maps, including normals, curvature, AO, thickness, and position.
• Post that they applied those maps onto the low poly mesh, which has helped them to have low poly count with visually-gripping visuals on mobile devices.
• Then they picked colours for it, which was followed by the addition of grunge and dirt materials.
• They have used designed smart materials and have tweaked the parameters to get the desired results.
• Followed by the export of the auto textures with Unity metallic export preset and assembled the auto inside Unity with all the textures. As they required a lot of skins for a single auto, substances came as a handy in the making of quick changes with texture iterations to check them out on Unity.

The Tuk Tuk shown below is the classic auto in the game, which is very close to real autos in Mumbai and Hyderabad.

Creation of Charminar: Making of the Charminar was a challenging task for them. Firstly, they had to make sure that the monument should be light weight design-wise, should not engage a lot of RAM while playing the game.  Secondly, they cannot compromise with the visual quality of it at the same time as it is one of the iconic monuments in India. The team said, “We decided early on that Charminar needed special attention.”They cracked the design of the monument like this:

• The Indo-Persian architecture inspired mosque has a lot of repeating patterns, like similar doors and windows, they took the route of making normal stamps.
• The normal stamps have saved a lot of their work, as they made the single high poly model.
• The Normal Stamps were generated from 3D models. A lot of repeated patterns were identified, and they later modelled on high detail and turned it into normal maps using Blender.
• Then imported those images into Substance and painted them onto the model, which gave the detailing that were required without the high poly mesh.

Here is a glimpse of creating detailed Charminar patterns in Blender and applying them in substance.

Here’s the glimpse of ice cream cart :

Here’s the glimpse of cart:

The studio are waiting for a period to receive as many bug reports as possible. Once they obtain enough feedback, they will initiate their work on a patch. That might require weeks or months to develop, but they are intended to fix most bugs and problems with the game. The team admits that occasionally a patch may also include extra features or content or which may even alter the gameplay.

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