时间轴：确保ADAM电影如期进行-CSDN博客

One of the biggest bottlenecks in film production is waterfall development. Read how Neill Blomkamp’s Oats Studios used Unity’s Timeline feature and Multi-Scene editing so their teams could work in parallel on characters, sets, lighting, and cameras, then real-time render at 30 FPS.

电影制作的最大瓶颈之一是瀑布开发。了解Neill Blomkamp的Oats Studios如何使用Unity的时间轴功能和多场景编辑，以便他们的团队可以并行处理角色，布景，灯光和照相机，然后以30 FPS进行实时渲染。

I’m SerEn (Sean) Low, an Art Tools Engineer specialized in Tools and Pipeline on the Made with Unity team. Prior to joining Unity Technologies, I was at Disney Interactive, developing animation tools for their console games, which collaborated with Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm. For the ADAM films, I helped integrate tools such as Alembic and Timeline, making sure the animation pipeline is streamlined and easy to maintain.

我是SerEn(Sean)Low，是一位艺术工具工程师，专门研究Unity团队的工具和管道。加入Unity Technologies之前，我曾在Disney Interactive工作，为他们的主机游戏开发动画工具，并与Pixar，Marvel和Lucasfilm合作。对于ADAM电影，我帮助集成了Alembic和Timeline等工具，以确保动画制作流程简化并易于维护。

实时项目的骨干 (The backbone of a real-time project)

Timeline was first introduced in Unity 2017.1 as our answer to artists and designers who wanted Unity to become a more intuitive tool for game, VR/AR and film development. They use Timeline for a variety of tasks, including creating and managing cinematic content, game-play sequences, audio tracks, and complex particle effects.

时间轴是在Unity 2017.1中首次引入的，旨在帮助那些希望Unity成为游戏，VR / AR和电影开发更直观的工具的艺术家和设计师。他们将时间轴用于各种任务，包括创建和管理电影内容，游戏序列，音轨和复杂的粒子效果。

Timeline was used to assemble all types of assets in the ADAM films

时间轴用于组装ADAM电影中的所有资产

During production planning, Oats identified Timeline as the backbone of their real-time film project. “I don’t think we could do what we’re doing without Timeline,” said VFX supervisor, Chris Harvey. “We hit Play and we watch – this is real time.”

在制作计划中，Oats将时间轴确定为其实时电影项目的骨干。 VFX主管克里斯·哈维(Chris Harvey)说：“没有时间轴，我认为我们无法做我们正在做的事情。” “我们点击播放，然后观看-这是实时的。”

Besides being a tool for real-time playback, Timeline was used in the second and third episodes of ADAM to meet many different real-time film production requirements.

除了作为实时播放的工具外，Timeline还用于ADAM的第二和第三集中，以满足许多不同的实时电影制作要求。

启用并行工作流程 (Enabling parallel workflows)

Unity’s Multi-Scene editing capability is commonly used in game production to allow various teams to work on different scenes individually and then combine them into a final large world.

Unity的多场景编辑功能通常用于游戏制作中，以使各个团队可以分别处理不同的场景，然后将它们组合成一个最终的大型世界。

Oats used Multi-Scene editing to organize their scene setups by team discipline – Main assets, Set (environmental/background), Lighting, Special Effects, etc. As well, they further organized assets in a scene into several Timeline instances. This is useful when dealing with a larger subset of an asset. A good example is for main characters because they typically require many tracks to assemble a full performance. These nested Timeline instances can be achieved using a ControlTrack.

Oats使用多场景编辑按照团队纪律来组织场景设置-主要资产，布景(环境/背景)，照明，特殊效果等。此外，他们进一步将场景中的资产组织为多个时间轴实例。在处理资产的较大子集时，这很有用。主角是一个很好的例子，因为它们通常需要许多音轨才能组合完整的演奏。这些嵌套的时间轴实例可以使用ControlTrack来实现。

Oats created several ControlTracks in a main Timeline, each for character animation, crowd animation, Alembic animation and sometimes even for lens flare. Besides permitting better organization, this nested structure also helps different teams to work on individual Timeline instances associated with their tasks only. It also makes version control simpler because changes are limited to individual Timeline assets and instances – meaning that there are fewer conflicts to be resolved each time an update is made.

燕麦在主时间轴中创建了多个ControlTrack，分别用于角色动画，人群动画，Alembic动画，有时甚至用于镜头光晕。除了允许更好的组织之外，此嵌套结构还帮助不同的团队处理仅与他们的任务相关联的各个时间轴实例。由于更改仅限于单个时间轴资产和实例，因此这也使版本控制更加简单-意味着每次进行更新时都需要解决的冲突更少。

A ControlTrack used in the main Timeline instance

主时间轴实例中使用的ControlTrack

Inside a “Character” Timeline instance (nested)

在“字符”时间轴实例内(嵌套)

Oats’ technical director, Mike Ferraro, explains: “Simultaneously, the animation team is doing final animation but everybody else can still work, as opposed to the old linear pipeline where it’s a waterfall, and each department has to finish before you can move on to the next stage. This is a fluid development experience for us.”

Oats的技术总监Mike Ferraro解释说：“与此同时，动画团队正在制作最终动画，但是其他人仍然可以工作，这与瀑布般古老的线性管道相反，每个部门都必须完成工作才能继续进入下一阶段。对我们来说，这是一个不断发展的经验。”

This parallel workflow is one of the main reasons that the two ADAM episodes were completed in just five months, which is relatively short compared to a traditional filmmaking pipeline.

这种并行的工作流程是两个ADAM情节在短短五个月内完成的主要原因之一，与传统的电影制作流程相比，该时间段相对较短。

管理一个复杂的多团队项目 (Managing a complex, multi-team project)

Given how complex and long Oats’ ADAM project was, there were a large number of assets in every scene that required careful planning and architecture in order to ensure the production was manageable at every point.

鉴于Oats的ADAM项目多么复杂和漫长，每个场景中都有大量资产，需要仔细计划和架构，以确保生产在每个点都是可管理的。

Besides using Multi-Scene editing and Timeline assets as a container, Oats also utilized Timeline’s Track Group to group similar asset types in the Timeline editor. This makes an assets group visible to only the team that works on it. Other team members work with this track group collapsed in the Timeline editor so they won’t risk introducing unnecessary changes to the assets group. For example, a lighting artist will expand the lighting track group and work on it, while the camera artist will collapse the lighting track group and focus on working in the camera group only.

除了使用多场景编辑和时间轴资产作为容器外，Oats还利用时间轴的跟踪组在时间轴编辑器中对相似的资产类型进行分组。这使得资产组仅对处理该资产的团队可见。其他与该跟踪组一起工作的团队成员在“时间轴”编辑器中折叠，因此他们不会冒险对资产组进行不必要的更改。例如，照明艺术家将扩展照明轨道组并对其进行处理，而摄影艺术家将折叠照明轨道组并仅专注于照相机组中的工作。

An expanded Track Group in ADAM: The Mirror

ADAM中扩展的跟踪组：《镜子》

A collapsed Track Group (note that you can still see the clip thumbnails in it)

折叠的轨道组(请注意，您仍然可以在其中看到剪辑缩略图)

使用自定义轨道进行精确的资产处理 (Using Custom Tracks for precise asset handling)

By default, Timeline includes an Animation Track, an Activation Track, and an Audio Track. But it can be further extended. One of its more potent features is the ability to write custom playable tracks. This enables you to control any property of any asset in a sequential manner.

默认情况下，时间轴包括动画轨道，激活轨道和音频轨道。但是它可以进一步扩展。其更强大的功能之一是能够编写自定义可播放曲目。这使您可以顺序控制任何资产的任何属性。

Oats wrote many custom tracks for their production needs. For example, there is a Lighting track to set the main light, Skybox material, ambient, and fog. There are also custom tracks for controlling shadow cascade settings, for adjusting fill light properties, and for swapping Post-Processing Stack profiles. These controls enable precise setting of assets for each shot throughout Timeline. For details about the Playables track, check out the documentation and video.

燕麦为满足他们的生产需求编写了许多自定义曲目。例如，有一个“照明”轨道可以设置主光源，Skybox材质，环境和雾。也有用于控制阴影级联设置，调整补光特性以及交换后处理堆栈配置文件的自定义轨道。这些控件可为整个时间轴中的每个镜头精确设置资产。有关Playables曲目的详细信息，请查看文档和视频。

A custom track for lighting and camera

灯光和摄像头的自定义轨道

使用Track Mixer混合片段 (Using Track Mixer for blending clips)

Another nice add-on to Custom Track is the ability to control how two Timeline clips calculate the differences in property values when they overlap. This blending behavior is really useful for enabling a smooth transition between two clips over time.

自定义轨道的另一个不错的附加功能是能够控制两个时间轴剪辑在重叠时如何计算属性值的差异。这种混合行为对于使两个片段随时间平滑过渡非常有用。

Overlapping two clips to create a blend

重叠两个剪辑以创建混合

Sample code for manipulating property value with weight

使用权重操作属性值的示例代码

To achieve this blending, Oats used a Track Mixer to control their camera properties via PlayableBehaviour. For example, they set up a custom track to control the main camera’s focus point. By setting up two clips with different focus points and then overlapping them in Timeline, Oats was able to manipulate the weight of each clip during the transition. This helped them achieve the focus-puller effect as shown below.

为了实现这种混合，Oats使用了一个Track Mixer通过PlayableBehaviour来控制其相机属性。例如，他们设置了自定义轨道来控制主相机的对焦点。通过设置两个具有不同焦点的剪辑，然后在时间轴中将它们重叠，Oats能够在过渡期间操纵每个剪辑的重量。如下所示，这帮助他们实现了焦点拉动效果。

Focus-puller effect shown in The Mirror

《镜报》中显示的聚焦拉力效应

其他插件如何与时间轴配合使用 (How other plugins works with Timeline)

With Custom Track and the Playable API, Timeline becomes an ideal framework for integration with Unity plugins such as Cinemachine, Alembic Importer, and Frame Recorder. When developing these plugins, the Unity R&D teams implemented them seamlessly within Timeline using the very same API available to the public, so once you install one, its tracks and associated clips immediately become available in Timeline for your production work. With the familiar Timeline workflow and structure, users will find it easy to use the new plugins.

借助Custom Track和Playable API，时间轴成为与Unity插件(如Cinemachine ， Alembic Importer和Frame Recorder)集成的理想框架。开发这些插件时，Unity研发团队使用与公众完全相同的API在时间轴中无缝实现了它们，因此，一旦安装它们，其轨道和相关剪辑将立即在时间轴中用于您的生产工作。通过熟悉的时间轴工作流程和结构，用户会发现使用新插件很容易。

Unity plugins integrated with Timeline

与时间轴集成的Unity插件

超越无限 (To infinity and beyond)

Given Timeline’s extensibility, there is still much potential, either to use it to architect your scene organization or to drive your asset properties in a sequential manner. Timeline will continue to improve as we receive more feedback and feature requests. For example, we’ve recently upgraded Audio Track to support waveform visualization in Unity 2017.2. Be sure to check out the Unity Roadmap for more Timeline features to come!

鉴于时间轴的可扩展性，仍然存在很大的潜力，可以使用它来构建场景组织或以顺序方式驱动资产属性。随着我们收到更多反馈和功能要求，时间表将继续改善。例如，我们最近升级了音轨，以支持Unity 2017.2中的波形可视化。请务必查看Unity路线图以了解更多的时间轴功能！

Special thanks to the Unity Timeline Dev Team: Sean Thompson, Julien Blais, Vlad-Andrei Lazar and Chafik Achache

特别感谢Unity时间轴开发团队： Sean Thompson，Julien Blais，Vlad-Andrei Lazar和Chafik Achache

Related resources

相关资源

More “Behind the Scenes” in ADAM
Check out our other in-depth posts on lighting, Alembic support, and clothing simulation.

ADAM中的更多“幕后花絮”
查看我们有关照明， Alembic支持和服装模拟的其他深入文章。

了解有关Unity的更多信息 (Learn more about Unity)

Find out how Unity 2017 and its features like Timeline, Cinemachine, Post-Processing Stack, and real-time rendering at 30 FPS help teams like Oats Studios change the future of filmmaking.

了解Unity 2017及其时间轴，电影机，后处理堆栈和30 FPS实时渲染等功能如何帮助Oats Studios等团队改变电影制作的未来。