SEGA-Sammy owned CGI animation studio Marza Animation Planet has been plenty busy since they debuted in early 2006 by doing opening animations on various SEGA games (including Night of the Werehog animated short), working on the CGI movie ‘Space Pirate Captain Harlock‘ and even being confirmed as doing the CGI for Sony Pictures ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ theatrical film. Seems that the company is always looking ahead and are now getting their feet wet by trying animations in Unreal Engine 4, showing off detailed animations running on the primarily used game engine.
These are ‘real-time demos’ shown off to Japanese gaming website 4Gamer. Marza talks about how making animations in a game engine is new to them and how impress they are with what is possible. This could help SEGA’s development team create faster assets and cut development time in games. The demos they showed off included Happy Forest (above), Ultimate Bowl and Kuro 1.2 in-engine effects . To see the other tech demos hit the jump.
Marza Animation Planet shows off their set for Happy Forest running on Unreal Engine 4.
Marza Animation Planet’s Ultimate Bowl shows futuristic Unreal Engine 4 animation (Kuro 1.0).
While Ultimate Bowl was using older effects, here is Kuro 1.2 effect tests
Check out the fully rendered frame of each tech demo vs their wireframes:
Below we see the work that went into the dragon’s eye. Using shaders from UE4:
Below is the ‘Material Editor’ design screen, pretty neat:
Something very interesting about these demos is that in their realization there also took part Yoshihisa Hashimoto, former SEGA employee and creator of the Hedgehog Engine, now with his new company LIBZENT Innovations that he owns.
Don’t see what Hashimoto has to do with this? Marza have always provided top level tech for SEGAs cgi offerings, could you possibly expand on what you mean?
Hashimoto was credited as the tech advisor. I think Deefy just means it’s nice to see the director of Unleashed working with Sega in some capacity again.
Yes, that’s what I meant, thanks for the explanation done at my support Blues … and Aki, I’m sorry if I have not responded more quickly and especially for not having done it with my own hand.
Ah right, see what you mean, good catch!
Interesting to see if anything comes out of this. SEGA’s been playing around with UE4 for a while if Marza has their hand on it.
Heh…the second vid had Yakuza music 😀