Success Story
Creative Planet - an award-winning studio that creates immersive fulldome films and VR animations - bases its production process on programs from the M&E Collection.
Creative Planet, is a studio that specializes in creating immersive fulldome films and VR animation. This specific direction has its roots in... planetariums! Sound intriguing? The team originated from the Warsaw planetarium at the Copernicus Science Center. It was here that they worked on their first joint projects, and it was here that the direction for creating their animation was born.
Creative Planet is a team of several people. Although small, it is extremely interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial. The proof? With a team of 7, they created a 40-minute animated film with 5 characters in about 2 years, meeting technical requirements exceeding even IMAX standards. A result no worse than that of a major animation film studio. The bar is further raised by the need to use a fisheye spherical camera, the need to model the space omnidirectionally, not just seen in a narrow frame, and the problematic nature of previewing the finished animation, especially at 1:1 scale.
The studio is one of the few companies on the European and even worldwide market that creates such interesting animations at the highest level. This is evidenced by more than a dozen industry awards that Creative Planet has won over the years. Their films are translated into various languages, and their animations also go beyond planetarium screens. For example, at Expo 2020 in Dubai, you could experience their work in the Polish pavilion, where they prepared an interactive experience of our nature and landscapes for visitors.
The studio's early productions focused on astronomy, space exploration or aeronautics. The first animations were created only in Autodesk 3ds Max, which was mainly used for "hard surface" modeling. Over time, the studio wanted to expanded its films to include animated characters that children like to identify with. This introduced a new dynamic dimension to the stories created.
A completely new theme emerged - still popular science, but also explaining various natural phenomena in a simple way, appropriate to a young audience In addition to objects or animals, human characters appeared.
This introduced a new dimension of creation - first of all, the process of building characters became more labor- and time-consuming. The themes of the films had to be universal and could not lose their scientific value with the passage of time and the emergence of new scientific discoveries on the subject.
The production process for a film is about two years, and the industry standard is to screen films in planetariums even a dozen years after their release. Creative Planet's team wanted to speed up the various stages of production as much as possible and shorten the time to deliver the animation to the market.
The new direction of animation required new tools. The natural step was to choose Autodesk Maya along with the entire Media & Entertainment Collection of programs. The combination of Autodesk Maya and Autodesk MotionBuilder resulted in the first character animations.
"Maya is such a hub that allows us to use the whole range of software around us and tie the whole project together."
- Maciej Ligowski, Creative Planet
Over time, it became clear that Autodesk Maya became the main program that, like the sun in a heliocentric system, centers many other tools around it, such as V-Ray and iClone. A major advantage of Autodesk Maya is the ability to use custom scripts to perform more complex operations, such as extremely precise camera path determination. And harnessing AI to write scripts can further streamline the process.
Rendering such complex scenes and animations is also not a simple thing. The studio has its own rendering farm built with 20 computers. A 40-minute film consists of about 140,000 frames (to be exact, it's 70,000 frames multiplied by 2, due to production in 3D stereo). Add to that the 8K resolution (or, more precisely, a square frame of 8192 x 8192 pixels).
Another solution that brought Creative Planet up to speed was the use of Motion Capture for animation. The Xsens system was a perfect fit for their pipeline and the needs of a small animation studio.
The Autodesk Maya program is a robust "combo" that processes large and elaborate scenes.
For example, for the production of "Peter Pan in a Tent," the Creative Planet team prepared the scenery for a show that takes place under a dome. In it, the actors are suspended on ropes, and the audience watches the performance from below. The animated setting is projected on a spherical screen. One of the opening scenes depicts 18th-century London at night. For this, the studio recreated, based on archival maps, the vast urban fabric of London. The artists faithfully recreated hundreds of buildings and streets, which, due to the scale, was only possible through scripting.
Autodesk Maya did an excellent job with such a huge and complex scene even despite the deployment of thousands of glowing lanterns and lights in the windows. Autodesk Maya handled such a huge and complicated scene perfectly.
Thanks to the use of a Xsens Motion Capture suit with sensors, the process of creating characters was significantly shortened. The captured motion data is of such high quality that many times, for less complex animations, no cleaning is required and one can go directly to retarget on the character in Maya.
The developers at Creative Planet are constantly striving to create top-notch animation.
The implementation of the entire Media & Entertainment toolkit has allowed them to increase the efficiency of production creation and achieve great animation quality, which always translates into a significant advantage in the industry.
Creativity, conception and aesthetics of creation are priceless, and well-tailored tools for production needs, enable them to develop even faster!
Polish version of this article:
Project summary
Duration & delivery
Autodesk solutions
Services provided
Customer industry
Improving Asset Creation and Pipeline in Game Dev Studio - Render Cube S.A.
Render Cube is an independent Polish game development studio based in Lodz, Poland, providing outsourcing services and later developing games on its own (Monster League, Medieval Dynasty). The main problem after the early release of the second game turned out to be the high expectations of players regarding the quality of the final product. Render Cube wanted to deliver the final version of the game in the highest possible quality. This required filling the whole universe with the highest quality assets and animations. The entire game was built on Unreal Engine, so in order to take advantage of its capabilities, the models had to be prepared in a perfect way with a great topology. Also, the variety of models could have been problematic due to the short time until release.
CERTYFI-CAD: Enhancing and Accelerating the Design Process and Communication with the Customer - PD&M Collection
CERTYFI-CAD is a design office in Rzeszow, Poland, established in 2012. In its activity, it offers services in designing mechanical machines and devices for various industries. In all cases, the scope of design work is agreed with the client and the best variant is proposed in order to achieve the intended effect as soon as possible. The company employs qualified engineers with vast knowledge and experience gained during execution of various projects. Moreover, the team is distinguished by excellent knowledge of 3D design software. During many years of work on various projects, CERTYFI-CAD has developed its own style which is based on involving the client in the project so that the final product is one hundred percent tailored to his needs. One often occurring problem during such cooperation was the lack of an ability to quickly design assembly configurators with different variants of parts or presenting variants of individual parts.
Juice - improving communication in creating animations and special effects - implementation of ShotGrid (Shotgun) in Visual Effects & Sound Studio
Juice - a full-services Visual Effects & Sound Studio with strong branches in VFX, animation and design - has worked on long, short, TV and feature productions for HBO, Dolby, BMW, Mercedes, Coca-Cola, Nike, Netflix, Sony Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, and the BBC (e.g: Margrete –Queen of the North”- feature film; commercial of Playstation5, Xiaomi MI11I, Samsung; trailers: „Ares – Our greatest adventure”, Cyberpunk 2077 –Official E3 2019”, Netflix – The Liberator – TV series and many others). The company has many different departments: ART, COMPO, FX, LIGHTING, ADMINISTRATION and IT. Teams of writers, artists, audio post producers, and production supervisors dote over each delicate creation with skill and passion. With each project they want to give as much creativity as possible. But Juice had problems with project management and communication at what stage a given/specific project is at a given moment as well as with the flow of current information within the company.
Contact Partner Finder for help using the online search tool and more. The Autodesk Assistant can help with Autodesk products, answer questions, or send you to an agent.
Partner Finder Terms of Use
By accessing and using Partner Finder, you acknowledge and agree to the following Additional Terms as referenced in the Website Terms of Use: (i) Partner Finder may be modified, updated, interrupted, limited, suspended, or discontinued at any time without notice or liability; (ii) any query or request for information regarding a specific provider or provider services may be forwarded to that provider, however Autodesk in its discretion may retain a record to conduct business analytics to improve Partner Finder and other Autodesk products and services; (iii) Autodesk has no obligation to enforce any terms on your behalf against another user; and (iv) any feedback you provide in connection with a provider, including ratings or reviews, is a non-confidential “Submission” as defined in the Website Terms of Use. You are advised to conduct your own independent analysis and assessment of any information provided by or though Partner Finder, including whether a selected provider is appropriate for your particular circumstances. Without limiting the Website Terms of Use, Autodesk does not warrant, endorse, guarantee, or assume responsibility for any service advertised or offered by a provider through Partner Finder or any hyperlinked website or service. Autodesk is not liable for the content of this site, or for the consequences of any actions you may take based on information provided by, or through, this site. You release Autodesk and its affiliates and subsidiaries from all liability arising from your use of Partner Finder, including any hyperlinked website, service, or content.
Translation tool disclaimer
This page has been translated for your convenience using a machine translation service. Reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate translation; however, no automated translation is perfect nor is it intended to replace human translators. As a result, this translation may contain errors and inaccuracies. Autodesk provides no warranties, either express or implied, about the accuracy, reliability, or completeness of the machine translation and disclaims all liability for any losses or damages caused by, or resulting from your reliance on, this translation. The English version of this website is the official version.
