Building an animation pipeline for VR stories

Penrose Studios is an animation studio that produces content for VR and AR devices. There are a multitude of fascinating new artistic challenges facing animators and directors creating this type of content, such as animating without a fixed camera and very few cuts. Studios currently leverage existing animation and production tools to create content rendered in real time. However, this new medium is hampered by traditional processes that greatly reduce artist productivity and creativity. For instance, animating in traditional third party tools and importing into VR often leads to unexpected results, which results in a suboptimal iteration loop. We present a variety of tools that improve the traditional animation pipeline to address these issues and reduce the frequency of context switches between virtual reality and 2D monitors. The result is a toolset where artists feel empowered to explore animation in this new art form without being crippled by inefficient workflows.