How to Recycle Your Digital Assets
Asset recycling is a technique used to save time, effort, and resources by repurposing existing creative content in new projects. Rather than creating entirely new assets from scratch, artists selectively reuse the ones they already have available to fulfill specific requirements. They need to have and maintain a diverse asset library to that end.
This practice is popular throughout different fields of the CG industry, but one of the well-known and entertaining examples is in animation studios. Let’s see a bit more about how asset recycling works there.
The process
Animation is a complex and resource-intensive process, even now, with all technological advancements. However, in the 1930s, during the Golden Age of Animation, animators drew each frame by hand. As you can imagine, that was a painstaking and lengthy process, and it involved many other people, each contributing with their skill.
That’s why artists and production managers were looking for ways to optimize the process, which led to many technological innovations, as well as some techniques — like asset recycling — to ease up the workload.
Animators started reusing animation sequences or segments from old projects. For example, a character’s walk cycle or a complex action sequence may be repurposed numerous times to create new content. The same goes for main and background character models, designs, and animations. While that can be done to save resources, it’s also a way to ensure consistency in visual appearance and character behavior.
Modular animations, on the other hand, are easier to adapt and combine to create new sequences. A set of predefined character movements, such as running and jumping, can be reused and customized to fit different scenes and scenarios. Backgrounds and environmental elements, like buildings, landscapes, and vehicles, are also often recycled to reduce production time.
Additionally, cutout animation techniques create characters and objects from separate, interchangeable pieces, allowing for easy reuse and manipulation. Animators may only need to alter poses and expressions to repurpose these elements.
Animation recycling can be a deliberate stylistic choice, as in limited animation techniques. They prioritize efficiency by minimizing the number of unique frames and movements required to convey motion. Artists can create fluid movement while conserving resources by reusing key frames and applying simple transformations.
Asset recycling may offer significant benefits regarding cost-effectiveness and production efficiency, but it comes with challenges. Maintaining visual quality and avoiding repetitiveness to ensure that the recycled animations seamlessly integrate with new content can sometimes require more work than creating new assets.
The prerequisite
It’s necessary to maintain and organize an extensive library of assets — character models, props, backgrounds, and special effects — to be able to recycle them. That is where Digital Asset Management solutions, like Connecter, come in.
With its help, you can easily assign metadata to your assets that will help you find and retrieve the ones you need with more ease and keep track of the produced content.
Connecter’s Asset View also allows for a better overview of what you have available, as you won’t need to go from folder to folder, looking blindly. It supports animations in BVH, as well as interactive previews of USD files, which are expected to play a significant role in the future developments in the CG industry.
The first step is to organize your digital assets systematically. Each asset should be tagged with relevant metadata so you can quickly locate assets and ensure they’re used appropriately within projects.
Then, you can benefit from other features like Version Control to track the asset iteration process, Workflows to optimize your production pipeline, Hybrid DAM for easier team collaboration, and much more.
The end result
Now, let’s look at some interesting cases of asset repurposing to inspire you.
Disney’s recycled animation
You’ve probably seen some of the countless videos comparing Disney’s animation movies and showcasing how the studio recycles assets. However, that wasn’t done to save money or resources, nor was it a company policy.
Instead, it was the personal decision of one of the company’s leading animators — Wolfgang Reitherman, part of the inner circle of Disney animators known as the “nine old men” in the 50s.
Reitherman was behind some of the classics we all know and love — Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, The Sword in the Stone, Winnie the Pooh, 101 Dalmatians, AristoCats, and more. He wanted to ensure the success of new productions, so he recycled content that he knew would be visually pleasing and successful with the audiences.
Asset reuse in anime
Asset recycling is a common and practical approach in anime studios where production timelines can be tight.
For example, backgrounds can be incredibly detailed and time-consuming to create. That’s why studios often reuse background images by altering colors, lighting, or adding minor details to give the illusion of different settings.
Additionally, anime often utilizes stock footage for special effects, action sequences, or recurring visual motifs. All that is stored in libraries and can be easily incorporated into new episodes or series.
Long-running series has an established practice of reusing character models and animations to streamline production. Animators repurpose key frames or entire animation sequences, such as a character’s signature move or facial expressions.
Some popular examples where you can easily notice asset recycling are Neon Genesis Evangelion, Sailor Moon, and Dragon Ball Super.
Asset repurposing in Western Animation
Probably most of your favorite childhood animation series resorted to asset recycling. By the 1960s, many animation studios had to reuse old content to make up for reduced budgets.
It became such an established practice that it’s practically impossible to find anything by Friz Freleng from Warner Bros after ’62 that doesn’t contain recycled animations.
You may have noticed that Bosko’s animation was commonly reused in the production of Looney Tunes, especially his dancing.
Newer titles popular among kids and adults nowadays, like Dora the Explorer, My Little Pony, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Simpsons, Spider-Man: The Animated Series, and numerous others, have recycled their fair share of animations, too.
Wrap up
Asset recycling is a widespread practice across various animation industries. It allows for efficiently repurposing existing character models, backgrounds, and animations to streamline production processes and maintain visual consistency.
However, ensuring the seamless integration of recycled assets into new projects requires careful management and organization of digital assets.
Digital Asset Management solutions like Connecter are essential in facilitating asset organization and management to optimize the efficiency of creative studio’s production pipelines and enhance resource utilization.
If you’re looking for a way to take control of your digital assets, our DAM might be a good fit for your needs. Contact our support team to find out more about its organizational and collaboration features.
Disclaimer: Some of the images in the article are generated by DALL-E.
