I'm interested to see how this pans out - the reality is, the lions share of the costs for animated features have nothing to do with rendering. I'm concerned they are buying the worst of both worlds with this approach: they still have to create good looking art assets, they still need to animated them well, but they are further constrained by the confines of what they can do in a realtime engine, with a toolchain that is not optimized for this type of work.
I do think that there is a ton to be gained from tightly coupled previs pipelines that don't incur rendering overhead. Ideally the artists should be able to see what they are working on in a form that is as close to the final render as possible, but without the wait. Systems that can offer this with low overhead cut down on the amount of time the artists need to get the results they want tremendously, especially in situations where your team isn't big enough to have modeling, texturing, animation, fx and lighting departments that are completely siloed.
That's not quite true - render time still is very important, even for the biggest studios like ILM/SPI/Dreamworks with the biggest renderfarms.
However, yeah, artist time is more costly, and recently GI pathtracing raytracers have made huge inroads in the VFX industry due to the fact that lookdev/lighting configuration is much quicker for the artists due to being physically-based, so you get very realistic lighting without faking it with AO or virtual lights.
It definitely speeds the iterative process up when the artists can see how the scenes looks on their workstation without kicking it off to the renderfarm and waiting 4 hours for a render to come back.
With Arnold or VRay, it's possible to get a very fast 3/4-bounce GI solution with heavy geometry and textures in a matter of minutes.
You have a point, however in regards to render times I was more speaking to films in this budget range. Big studios have custom toolchains, and do everything in-house, rendering included. If you are using non-proprietary 3D software, there are rendering services at your disposal that are often pretty reasonably priced.
In short, Source Filmmaker was a never officially released tool that was used as part of the production of the TF2 and L4D promotional videos. It provided tools for recording footage, basic editing, and advanced rendering that went beyond the engine's realtime capabilities.
I built the MovieMaker tool for the original Company of Heroes. The key goals were to seamlessly blend cinematics with gameplay and to reuse assets that were already created for the game.
I haven't used Source Filmmaker but I wouldn't recommend using the MovieMaker tool for actual films. The use case is completely different.
I just want to say congratz on being part of making a great game. The opening level with the Normandy landing where the cinematics led into the level was amazing. I remember feeling terrible giving the orders for the soldiers to move out of cover to take the machine gun nests knowing that half of them would die in order to advance. It was both disturbing and awe inspiring at the same time. A pretty amazing game.
Valve has a working relationship with production studio Brown Bag Films, according to Kotaku, and agreed to license the engine for Deep.
I'm curious if you actually need a license to use an engine in a film. Presuming you produce all your own assets and otherwise have an appropriate license for the engine to render it once, is there any precedent for requiring a license to perform it as well? I'm assuming you don't need a performance license for NLE software like premiere or vegas?
Note "working relationship" rather than "license": the obvious advantage of building a movie in a game engine is that you could quite possibly very quickly commercialize a game based on the movie if it turns out to be a success.
And with that thought I felt my third eye open just a crack, revealing a vision of how movie/game franchises of the future might be funded and marketed. :) Interesting stuff, or at least, in a few years it might be.
That said the difference between the rendering of the artists workstation and the renderfarm is getting smaller and smaller. At some point folks like Weta will be able to put together pretty kick ass effects for the dailies. Its pretty good now but eventually ...
A pro studio will go for the best tool (with cost considered as a factor) not the cheapest tool. It doesn't pay to cheap out on tools, especially if it leads to extra labor costs because of bad workflow, etc.
Plus all other factors aside, you have to imagine there's some name recognition involved. Valve and Source are big brands, and could draw in a curious audience if only for the novelty.
Fifteen million euros for machinima? Where is the money going?
I can see how Source would be a good way to make a reasonable-looking animated movie on the cheap. But with a reasonable amount of money to spend, then either:
a) You're reusing enough existing stuff (character models, physics enginey stuff, et cetera) that you can't possibly spend that much money, or
b) You're re-doing enough stuff from scratch that there doesn't seem to be much advantage to doing it in Source rather than something more conventional like Maya [or whatever they're using nowadays]
In making an animated movie heaps of money goes in all sorts of places besides the animation itself. Writers, directors, actors and all the other production crew folks etc... distribution, advertising and so on...
Who knows what the break down is - and whether the choice to use source is based on cost efficiencies alone. Perhaps they are going for a particular visual style... I would have thought the source engine is sufficiently old enough to give such a film an interesting retro aesthetic...
A friend of mine works in film, so I know the ballpark costs from conversations with him. You can find production costs for films on the net fairly easily.
Puss in Boots, for example was $130 million and Kung Fu Panda 2 was around $150 million. So you're looking at 1.25m to 1.5m per minute.
I do think that there is a ton to be gained from tightly coupled previs pipelines that don't incur rendering overhead. Ideally the artists should be able to see what they are working on in a form that is as close to the final render as possible, but without the wait. Systems that can offer this with low overhead cut down on the amount of time the artists need to get the results they want tremendously, especially in situations where your team isn't big enough to have modeling, texturing, animation, fx and lighting departments that are completely siloed.