- by Lesley Klassen
The global pandemic shone a light on the fragility of life. When looking back at our accomplishments this year we're grateful that we have successes to share. We know many are struggling to keep their spirits up during the holiday season. We will get through this.
When the pandemic hit our province we immediately moved to remote work. This is one of our biggest successes in 2020. We learned we can grow a company, keep on task, and create new processes all from home. This has expanded our capacity to bring in new talent from all over the world.
Although our move to remote work has been pretty smooth, we are missing the traditions of our old office. The photo below is the pole where we would document our post morning meeting chants.
We finished a prototype of an XR viewership app that we are currently developing with our partners at the Canadian Media Fund. In 2021, we will bring it to market. As part of this project we are releasing three pieces of content including a branching narrative called The Outlaw. We will share more in the new year.
We wrapped up a project with the Women's Entrepreneurship Fund that supported porting Flipside Studio to the Quest. This year will expand our efforts and we plan on releasing it in 2021.
We engaged with Seven Oaks School Division and New Media Manitoba to teach virtual production and animation to high school students in Manitoba. During this course, the students worked on a project which was then passed off to a Red River College intern to complete. The COVID Characters is a short documentary created by high school students and made in Flipside Studio.
We also had the joy of working with Bento Box Entertainment, the makers of Bob's Burgers. Although we can't share what we did together we can share that working with their team was a highlight for many us at Flipside XR.
In June we left early access. Venture Beat wrote a great article highlighting our accomplishments. This has been two years in the making and we are excited for the future of Flipside Studio. Along with this, we launch a new website and updated our branding. Our customers work in animation, visual effects, and the interactive industry. Now our brand reflects the professional market we are focused on.
As a Canadian company that has innovation at our core, we were eligible for a number of COVID relief programs. We are grateful that our provincial and federal governments see the value of supporting its workforce. Thank you to NRC-IRAP, the Canadian Media Fund, and the Province of Manitoba.
In spite of everything that's happening in the world, we are hiring in 2021. We know that the world needs tools to create content safely and we will continue to build the tools that Flipside creators need and build out the future of animation.
Thank you to all of our champions, supporters, creators, family and friends who have kept us going since we started this company in 2014. Let's keep pushing through this challenging time and emerge from this pandemic better and more prepared for the future to come.
- by Starling
“When you're doing this mocap stuff live, there's just nothing like having a character seeing the other character in real time . . . picking up a prop and making a joke or throwing something because you're angry. You just can't do this stuff outside of the software that you guys built, outside this mocap concept of animation,” says Alex Albrecht, Head of Caffeine Productions. “I don't know how we go back into a studio and not bring Flipside with us.”
We’ve been following Alex since Diggnation, a weekly video podcast he hosted with Kevin Rose that ran for 7.5 years. Lately, Alex and his team at Caffeine.tv have been using Flipside Studio to produce two animated shows: Live From the 8th Dimension and The Dungeon Run. We sat down with Alex to discuss his love for all things VR, motion capture, and how his team creates animated shows remotely using Flipside Studio.
“I came out here as a computer science guy,” says Alex. His career in the entertainment industry started in the early 2000s. With a computer science degree and a passion for improv comedy, he moved to L.A. and took a job at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit global policy think tank.
Alex spent a lot of time watching TechTV, and was particularly intrigued by an hour-long daily tech show called The Screen Savers. After meeting a producer from TechTV at a wedding and learning his favourite show was holding co-host auditions, Alex jumped at the opportunity.
“I have an improv background and a computer science degree. Where do I sign?”
Three weeks later he was co-hosting The Screen Savers with Kevin Rose, which led them to create Digg.com and the video podcast Diggnation. From there he created, produced, and hosted content for the Revision3 network, and went on to direct and produce several feature films and commercials.
When his friend started Caffeine.tv, a live social experience app, Alex joined as an advisor, and eventually came on full time to manage original productions. Now he’s the head of production at Caffeine and oversees everything the network produces in house, including the production of two shows with the help of Flipside Studio.
“I always knew that this technology could really get rid of the barrier to entry for animation and for mocap specifically,” says Alex about his first experiences with Flipside Studio. “Because it’s based on a game engine you can literally do anything you want. If you can imagine it, you can do it.”
His biggest challenge was convincing people it was possible to create an hour of content for a weekly animated show. It hadn’t been done before.
“Twenty-two minutes is basically the most anybody makes of animated content. And they take months and months and months to generate that. And here we are going—no we're gonna do an hour and we're gonna do it every week.”
They set up the VR equipment and started to experiment. One night while Alex was away, the team put on the VR headsets, chose their characters, and hit record.
“I watched it and I was like, this is amazing. This is hysterical. It clearly was improvised. It was clearly just three people punchy at work. But it was undeniably engaging.”
From there, Alex’s team at Caffeine created Live from the 8th Dimension, which had a 46-episode run. They used Flipside Studio for every aspect of the show, and became a sort of “power beta tester” putting the software through its paces and pushing it to where it is today.
“We did everything that it was designed for. At every split second of the day. There was no feature that we weren't using extensively,” says Alex.
Years before he learned about Flipside Studio, Alex had a moment while playing Star Trek Bridge Commander, a VR game where you could embody a Star Trek Character on a ship.
He was catching up with one of the other players before everyone else arrived. His friend, as a Vulcan science officer, was telling him about meeting a girl at a bar. “But I'm seeing a Vulcan science officer in a Star Trek-like conference room, and he's like hanging his head in his hands . . . It was hysterical. Like, that was a piece of content I would consume.”
Alex was also learning about Machinima, the concept of using real-time game engines to create cinematic productions, but found the process too complicated.
“But then when Flipside came along and I was like, oh, I get it. It's Machinima. It's Star Trek Bridge Commander. But it also gives us all these production tools that we can understand because we know how production works. It just all came together . . . it was the one tool that really did everything.”
One of Caffeine’s Flagship Shows is The Dungeon Run, a weekly live RPG tabletop narrative experience. The show featured five players sitting together around a table on a massive set with an animatronic puppet as the host. The production design team built elaborate Dungeons & Dragons models, and they had multiple cameras and a jib capturing the action.
When COVID hit in spring 2020, they had to find a way to create the show without having everyone in the same physical space. After some testing, they landed on a concept that has the players on screen on video chat, with the digital map on a virtual table in Flipside Studio. The miniatures are animated and can move in real time.
“That concept has evolved into some of the most amazing Dungeons & Dragons playing that has ever been put to tape . . . it's better than what we do in the studio,” Alex says. “I don't know how we go back into a studio and not bring Flipside with us.”
All 46 episodes of Live From the 8th Dimension are available on YouTube.
The Dungeon Run streams live every Wednesday at 6pm PT https://www.caffeine.tv/thedungeonrun. Watch old episodes here and see how the production has changed with the times.
To learn more about Alex and Caffeine.tv, check out their website.
Want to start making your own mocap animation? Click here to learn more about Flipside Studio.
Watch our unedited interview with Alex below:
- by Lux
Today we are celebrating the launch of Flipside Studio 2020.1, along with a completely updated brand and website refresh.
With over 32,000 recordings, a 48-episode comedy show produced live by Caffeine Studios, and a kid's show streaming on Super RTL, the largest private broadcaster in Germany, all made with Flipside Studio, we couldn't be more excited to be rolling out tons of new features and seeing what our users will create with them.
Flipside Studio now supports not only one type of multiplayer, but two (is that another first in VR?!). Now you can choose the best type of connection for your productions.
Here's a handy reference to help you choose:
We've added the ability to add physics colliders on characters so that their interactions with the environment feel more realistic. You can generate colliders for a character in the Flipside Creator Tools with a single click, and then tweak them to suit your needs.
Note that body physics can be very performance intensive, so we recommend going through the generated colliders and removing ones that aren't necessary to achieve the shots you need. Often you can get away with just a collider or two on the arms and midsection of the body, but it can scale all the way up to individual fingers if needed.
We've added a new facial expression mode that lets you add blinking and expressions to texture-based faces, which lets your characters have more expressiveness while recreating that classic cartoon style. You can also mix and match styles now too, so part of your face can be animated with textures and another can be animated with blend shapes or even Unity animations. The possibilities are pretty much endless.
Flipside Studio can now appear as a virtual camera device that apps like Zoom, Skype, etc. can use as your video source. To enable it, go to Settings > Output on the desktop camera switcher interface and look for the DirectShow settings.
The teleprompter controller has been revamped to include auto-scrolling with a slider to adjust the scroll speed.
We've made a number of improvements to how eyes move on characters in Flipside Studio, including improved idle movement with simulated saccades and world-space points of interest, more natural blinking, and improved range of motion when eyes lock onto targets of interest.
We've added a TwitchActions component to the Flipside Creator Tools that lets you define custom Twitch chat commands that users can type which then trigger actions in your custom sets. This can be used for anything from triggering sounds and visual effects to voting on the direction the show's narrative should take.
We've added a ton of new interactive functionality to the Flipside Creator Tools, letting you build sets with interactions as complex as games. There's even a scoreboard element that keeps score for everyone in the scene.
Build your own guns (or pea-shooters!), choose-your-own-adventure stories, and more with over a dozen new components. The best part is you can hit Play in Unity and test them all in VR without having to build and upload your sets, making the Flipside Creator Tools a very powerful tool for crafting interactive VR experiences.
We've added support for an unlimited number of camaras in the VR camera switcher, which is now found under the Show Tools menu, and you can have as many VR camera switchers as you need too.
We've increased the recorded and multiplayer audio quality in Flipside Studio from 16 kHz (the standard for VoIP) to 24 kHz, which noticeably improves the voice quality particularly in frequencies between 8-12 kHz. We did this while also improving our audio playback performance!
With this release, we have now completed our upgrade from Unity 2017 to 2019, meaning all assets should be made using Unity 2019 from now on. This was our first major Unity upgrade since supporting user-uploaded assets and taught us a lot about how to migrate successfully when users also have to update their assets.
If you're still making assets in Unity 2017, now's the time to head over to the Flipside Creator Tools page to find the new version of Unity to use and update those assets! We've done a lot to make it backwards compatible with 2017 assets, but some compatibility issues couldn't be solved automatically.
Flipside Studio
Flipside Creator Tools
Flipside Studio 2020.1 is now the current stable release on Oculus Home and SteamVR, so those of you on the Beta channel that don't want the latest experimental features can access this release on the regular Stable channel now. We will be introducing a new beta with some exciting new features in the next few weeks, so feel free to stick to the Beta channel if you're interested in testing those out.
If you make your own custom characters and sets, you will also need to upgrade to the Flipside Creator Tools 2020.1, which can be downloaded from here.
From the Flipside XR team, we want to say a big thanks to all of our users who have helped shape this release by testing and and finding bugs for us to fix. You've all helped make Flipside what it is today.
Sincerely,
Team Flipside
- by Lux
Please note: This update includes some big changes which we wanted to give everyone time to test out safely and adapt to their projects, so to try it out you'll need to opt into our Beta release channel. Instructions on switching between release channels can be found here.
Click here to download the release candidate of the Flipside Creator Tools (2020.1.0-rc2).
With this update, we're also moving to a new calendar versioning-based version numbering system, which is described in more detail here.
This release of both Flipside Studio and Flipside Creator Tools now share the version 2020.1.0-rc2.
- by Lux
Please note: This update includes some big changes which we wanted to give everyone time to test out safely and adapt to their projects, so to try it out you'll need to opt into our Beta release channel. Instructions on switching between release channels can be found here.
We're excited to announce that today's release on the Flipside Studio beta release channel is our first release candidate for a new stable version of Flipside Studio.
What this means is we're holding off on any major new features to focus on fixes and usability improvements until we feel it's ready to move over to the stable channel for everyone to use. If there are no major issues with this release, we'll move it over (along with any fixes we make in the meantime) to the stable channel after a couple weeks of general use.
Once we go stable, it will also complete our migration from Unity 2017 to 2019, so now's the time to update any assets that haven't been updated to Unity 2019 yet.
Click here to download the release candidate of the Flipside Creator Tools (2020.1.0-rc1).
With this update, we're also moving to a new calendar versioning-based version numbering system, which is described in more detail here.
This release of both Flipside Studio and Flipside Creator Tools now share the version 2020.1.0-rc1.
- by Lux
Please note: This update includes some big changes which we wanted to give everyone time to test out safely and adapt to their projects, so to try it out you'll need to opt into our Beta release channel. Instructions on switching between release channels can be found here.
We've added a plugin that creates a "Flipside Studio" virtual camera device in Windows, so you can select Flipside in your camera list in any video chat software, including Zoom, Skype, Slack, Whereby, etc.
To turn the virtual camera device on, press Alt+D in Flipside Studio. The first time you do, Windows will popup up a notice requesting administrative permission to install the virtual camera device. Give it permission and you should see "Flipside Studio" in your camera options the next time you launch your video chat software of choice.
Note: If you don't see "Flipside Studio" in your camera options, you may need to restart Windows for the change to take effect.
Also note that you will need to press Alt+D to enable the virtual camera each time you run Flipside Studio while this feature is still considered experimental and not enabled by default.
Click here to download the latest version of the Flipside Creator Tools beta (v0.33).
Duplicating the scene file for a character or set can lead to issues building bundles because Unity gets confused when more than one scene file has the same asset bundle label.
To make this less error-prone, we've added a new Duplicate Selected Scene menu option under the Flipside Creator Tools menu which duplicates the scene and also changes the asset bundle label at the same time, making it easy now to create alternate versions of characters and sets for testing.
- by Lux
Please note: This update includes some big changes which we wanted to give everyone time to test out safely and adapt to their projects, so to try it out you'll need to opt into our Beta release channel. Instructions on switching between release channels can be found here.
We've revamped our teleprompter controller to support auto-scrolling with an adjustable speed slider. You can play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, or advance one screen of text at a time.
Last update we added the ability to delete your saved setups. This update adds the ability to update them as well, so you can now dress your sets exactly how you want them, save your setup, then come back and make further refinements at a later time.
- by Lux
Please note: This update includes some big changes which we wanted to give everyone time to test out safely and adapt to their projects, so to try it out you'll need to opt into our Beta release channel. Instructions on switching between release channels can be found here.
Eye movement has been improved in the following ways:
We've moved the VR camera switcher to the Set Builder menu under Show Tools. This also means you can have as many VR camera switchers as you want!
This means that the desktop camera switcher going fullscreen doesn't open the VR camera switcher any more. Instead, it works totally independently. Press Alt+F to go fullscreen, and press Esc to exit fullscreen.
You'll see the instructions "Press Esc to exit fullscreen" appear on your monitor when you move your mouse, but it only shows up with a deliberate move of the mouse so it won't pop up if you accidentally bump your desk while in VR.
The latest version of the Flipside Creator Tools (v0.31) can be downloaded here.
- by Lux
Please note: This update includes some big changes which we wanted to give everyone time to test out safely and adapt to their projects, so to try it out you'll need to opt into our Beta release channel. Instructions on switching between release channels can be found here.
This release focuses primarily on the Flipside Creator Tools, but includes several important fixes to Flipside Studio as well. To download the latest version of the Flipside Creator Tools, (v0.30), head over to the installation and setup page.
We've added a new TwitchActions component that lets you define custom Twitch commands (e.g., "!vote") that can trigger actions in your custom sets and characters.This opens up a ton of new possibilities for interactions with your audiences on Twitch!
See the FlipsideCreatorTools/Examples/Example-TwitchActions scene in the latest Flipside Creator Tools release to try it out for yourself and see how it works. There are three commands, "!ding", "!bloop", and "!vote" that are connected to different sounds. "!vote" is combined with our TriggerCounter component so that it takes 5 votes to trigger the event.
We've added a new GroupChoiceElement component and prefab that lets you create decision points that all users present must vote on to determine the chosen outcome. This makes it possible to build shared choose-your-own-adventure experiences.
See the FlipsideCreatorTools/Examples/Example-GroupChoice scene in the latest Flipside Creator Tools release to try it out for yourself and see how it works.
- by Lux
Please note: This update includes some big changes which we wanted to give everyone time to test out safely and adapt to their projects, so to try it out you'll need to opt into our Beta release channel. Instructions on switching between release channels can be found here.
We're excited to be able to share some major improvements to the Flipside Creator Tools in terms of improved testing workflow to save you time building interactive elements in your sets, as well as introducing a number of new types of interactivity that can be built into custom sets.
To download the latest version (v0.29), head over to the installation and setup page.
In order to test the custom interactions in your sets, just press play in Unity and hop into VR. All of the interactive elements provided by the Flipside Creator Tools package are now fully interactive for testing right inside the editor. Grab and pick up any PropElement, throw it, or press the trigger to use it just like you would in Flipside Studio. Teleport around using your right-hand joystick and trigger, just like in Flipside Studio.
To try it out, open the Assets/FlipsideCreatorTools/Examples/Example-ScoringSystem scene after installing or updating and press play.
Pro tip: You can also test the facial expressions of your custom characters using the left-hand joystick, just like in Flipside Studio.
We've introduced a number of new components that let you trigger events in different ways, including:
Other new components like FollowElement let you attach objects to the user's hand, or teleport an object back to its home using the new TeleportObjectTo and TeleportObjectsOnContact components, and the PhysicsEstimator component even lets you seamlessly switch control of an object from a Unity animation or other kinematic movement to Unity's physics engine taking it over.
Click here for a list of core interactive components.
We've also introduced several new components for creating mini-games and interactions that require keeping score. These include:
Everything has been designed to work over multiplayer as well as in Flipside Studio recordings, opening up many new storytelling possibilities. To get started, after installing or updating to the latest Flipside Creator Tools release (v0.29) in Unity, open and inspect the Example-ScoringSystem scene in the Assets/FlipsideCreatorTools/Examples folder.
Click here for a list of scoring-related interactive components.
Sets with many audio sources can cause performance issues, so we've introduced a PooledAudioElement component that lets you hook into Flipside's internal pool of audio sources for virtually unlimited audio sources in your sets. PooledAudioElement also lets you configure audio spatialization settings, and implement audio volume changes in reaction to events in your scene.
The in-VR camera switcher panel now has back/forward buttons under the camera position previews, so you can swap between groups of 8 camera positions and cut between a virtually unlimited number of cameras.
Additionally, we've made the following fixes that span both Flipside Studio (beta channel) and Flipside Creator Tools (v0.29):
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