Goodbye Kansas Studios is studio that creates award-winning visual effects, digital animation and motion capture for movies, game trailers and commercials. Recently they've collaborated with CD PROJEKT RED in producing this Cyberpunk 2077 – E3 Cinematic Trailer. That 4 minutes long 4K cinematic trailer premiered at E3 2019 and was an instant success. With over 55 million views so far (sep 2019) it’s one of most successful game trailers ever. Today CG Record team welcome Fredrik Löfberg (Director), Henrik Eklundh (VFX Supervisor) and Rebeca Cervantes (Producer) from Goodbye Kansas Studios to talk about how did they team do Visual Effects and Animation for the trailer.
1. Can you please talk a bit about the project and how had you cooperated with CDPROJEKTRED on Cyberpunk 2077 trailer?
As most things in life this was all about timing, being in the right place at the right time. It all started when Goodbye Kansas director Fredrik Löfberg reached out to CD Projekt Red’s Cinematic Director Pawel Swierczynski. He wrote to him expressing his admiration for his and CDPR’s work, Pawel replied with a similar note saying that just one week before he had presented GBK Overkill’s The Walking Dead Cinematic to his team and management.
Shortly thereafter, a creative team flew down to Warsaw, we were greeted with open arms and the rest as they say, it’s history.
One of our main goal here at Goodbye Kansas is to be a very open and collaborative studio, we pride ourselves on inviting our clients into our way of working and always keeping the door open to them and for CDPR this was no exception. We quickly became friends and so began our collaboration on what became the biggest cinematic trailer to come out of E3 2019.
At first CDPR shared an early draft of the script, we started working together on developing it, soon we went to storyboarding, camera language and storytelling.
During the entire process we had a great collaboration between our studios, every single person working on the trailer wanted the same outcome, for it to become something spectacular.
2. How long does it take your team to do all the Animation and VFX works?
From when we started the asset production to the finish line it was about 5 months, about 2 of those were spent in shot production.
3. What is special thing on this project that you would like to share us? What can be consider as the best experience you have had during the process?
To be part of this fantastic IP and to work with such professionals over at CDPR was a blast. We could really go all in on all the details and the Art Direction led us to some fantastic images. The performance heavy way of doing a trailer is always interesting because you really start to understand the characters of this world even though this was just a short piece.
4. Please tell us some technical details in the process of making VFX and Animation for the trailer? For example: What software, plugin was used from animating, texturing, rendering and compositing?
Our pipeline lets us utilize almost any major software out there and some smaller. Some of the most utilized by Goodbye Kansas are Houdini , Maya, Motionbuilder, V-Ray, Substance, Zbrush and Nuke. We pride ourselves in treating all disciplines with care so that we can get the highest possible quality for every department involved in creating this fantastic piece.
5. Can you share with us on how your team created such realistic CGI Character for the film? And how Capture Division had helped you in creating realistic character movement and facial capture?
The goal wasn’t realism for us here, it’s portraying the characters as they are in the game but with some added details and of course make them be able to perform and show emotions with our proprietary facial rigs. We have been working with characters and digital humans for a very long time and have several people in different departments always contributing to making them better and more believable. Our mocap stage and capture tech make sure that we can pull of really believable emotions and actions that are then edited by our different performance departments such as Facial Animation, Body Animation and Keyframe Animation.
6. The shader like skin is so realistic in 4K. Please tell us a little bit on how had you created the shader?
The AlSurface shader for VRAY was used and we have been improving our way of shading for a very long time. We spend a lot of time with details like pores, dirt, hair, gloss maps etc. until we get a skin that has enough fidelity to go to shot production. Here light is a big key as well as compositing everything together so the skin fits and is lit properly. We usually adjust some of the specular per shot. Jonas Skoog our Character Lead set up the basis shader for all characters and then we had individual artists helping out with detail maps but as always, it’s all a big collaboration between many departments and many people to create these fantastic characters.
7. Can you share with us more about CGI Keanu? How did you capture and create this special character in CGI?
Out of respect for our friends at CD Projekt Red we can only say that having Keanu onboard is obviously a big thing, but we are not at liberty to say too much about him or his involvement. We can say that it was really vital for everyone involved that he became instantly recognizable.
8. Not only CGI Character but a lot of cool Visual Effects was appeared on the trailer. Please tell us more on how to simulating these FXs?
We always try to use Houdini for FX as well as charFX. Cigar smoke can be trickier than you initially think but I think we pulled it off greatly in the end with our FX lead Max Öberg leading the efforts. The water and washing of hands was something we had done before but I think we put it into a new level of quality, the shot when he is washing his hands came out really early and really great. We used a variety of techniques like skin sliding
9. What is the biggest thing that you’ve archived after this project? What can we expect in the future projects?
To build on our performance and make sure the characters come alive to the audience as well as the world they live in.
Thank you all very much for your time and please send our Greeting to your talented team
Thanks CGRecord!
Cyberpunk 2077, the open-world, action-adventure story from CD PROJEKT RED, is coming to Xbox One, PS4 and PC April 16th, 2020.
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