May 17, 2019

Russian animated series "Jinglekids" small team aims for ambitious visuals

You may have noticed that the Russian-made children's animated series "Jingle Kids (Jingliks)" is now available on Netflix. You may also have noticed the high quality of animation in this show produced by Open Alliance Media.

Jingle Kids takes place in Jingle City, where human characters and furry creatures have numerous adventures together. The series is based on the original children's book (called Jingrix).

Showrunner and director Anton Vereshchagin shared with Cartoon Brew the technical and structural challenges of producing an animated series in Russia.

Vereshchagin took on the roles of director, showrunner, art lead, and production supervisor, and jumped into 3D production itself while launching Jingle Kids. After we produced the first four episodes, Disney Russia acquired the exclusive rights to air the series for about two years." Then it was sold around the world, distributed in China by VOD platform Tencent, and in April on Netflix in 190 countries around the world."

Production began with a small team in St. Petersburg, which was then sold to Open Alliance, which launched Open Alliance Media to produce the series.

For Vereshchagin, that meant not only moving forward with the show, but also setting up an entire studio, building a pipeline, and hiring a team. 'For the first few months, it was just a few of us. We didn't have enough people. We had up to 40 people working on the show on a regular basis, but we also had a lot of freelance animators from all over the world."

The main tool at the team's disposal for animation was Autodesk's Maya. Pixologic's Zbrush was used for sculpting, and Foundry's Mari and Allegorithmic's Substance were used for texturing. Yeti from Peregrine Labs was used for hair and fur simulation, Phoenix from Chaos Group for FX sims, V-Ray for rendering, and Nuke for compositing. From a project management perspective, Shotgun was used for shot management and Thinkbox's Deadline for render management.

In many ways, this is a very standard pipeline for animation and visual effects. However, Vereshchagin specifically points out that it was the adoption of V-Ray that allowed his small team to complete the ambitious film. First of all, I was afraid," he says, "that we would have to go back to V-Ray. At the time, V-Ray was not that popular in animation production, and I was in the middle of producing the first pilot episode. But I decided to take the risk of drastically changing the pipeline. I finally got what I wanted: an out-of-the-box solution. [They gave me 50 licenses of render nodes and 4 months of workstations for free, guaranteed ultra support, hired a render TD named Pavel Igumnov, who was a beta tester for V-Ray, and started using the new renderer. By the end of the pilot episode's production, Chaos Group had provided V-Ray with almost all the features we needed. Our experience with V-Ray and the quality of the images inspired several Russian studios to use V-Ray as well."

Despite the positive experience with V-Ray, the production of "Jinglekids" faced some uphill battles in reaching the level of quality they sought. One was rendering time. "Due to the extremely heavily detailed environment, it could take up to 10 hours to render a single frame. Or some scenes were not even in "blade" memory because they could not be optimized. The rendering did not have all the features we needed right off the bat, and we ran into a lot of problems with the pilot version. "

The team was then able to reduce the rendering time to 40 minutes per frame in Full HD and 2 hours per frame for 4K scenes, but getting it to work efficiently was tough at first. Vereshchagin admitted, "If you look closely at the intro to the show, you'll notice some noise." 'Flying over Jingle City was a great idea, but the scene was so heavy that we couldn't avoid the noise during the render. And due to the delivery schedule, we decided to leave it as is. Unfortunately, we didn't have the resources to re-render it and make it as great as it should be."

There were other challenges as the production journey continued. Vereshchagin was initially unhappy with the way the rocks looked on the show, despite the time it took to sculpt them in CG. 'So starting with episode 10, we tried using 3D scanning instead, which turned out to be a great decision.'

Further hurdles were mostly related to the time it took to complete the modeling and simulation. For example, the character rigs were initially too complex and were later simplified. Wind was simulated in many of the natural environments, but this proved to be too time consuming and was later incorporated only in the foliage of trees, ignoring its effect on grass and bushes. Character fur and hair dynamics were also kept simple.

If the technical pressure on the new team as the show grew rapidly was not difficult enough, Vereshchagin suggested that another obstacle was finding the right people in Russia. Until the last few years," he said, "there were no courses or universities in Russia where one could specialize in computer graphics. You could get a director's degree or an artist's degree, but nothing narrowly specialized." [Most industry professionals are self-taught. At the same time, "the number of projects increased dramatically, and studios began to hunt for talent. Studios spend a lot of money to train people because labor regulations in Russia do not allow them to sign one-year contracts, but that doesn't stop anyone from leaving the studio if they find a more attractive job.

Still, with "Jingle Kids," the creators have managed to produce something that stands out and will receive additional worldwide exposure when it is distributed on Netflix. Vereshchagin attributes the series' success to the fact that it is very "creator-driven."

"We've operated as if we were working on a very personal artistic project," Vereshchagin says. And so did almost every member of the team." Each episode ends with "To Our Children," which is what we really meant. Also, every little detail is essential. Even the way the stones are arranged on the river bottom. It is the details that make the universe true."