The Brief:
Learn Unreal Engine so it can be incorporated into future projects whilst also providing a marketable output that can be used to pitch to companies in a relevant sector.
A new idea
Unreal Engine is a software that I have a lot of personal interest in and I’d been pitching it to Ouno for a while.
The studio had seen it’s capabilities before when I used it to update our SSE wind turbine animation however we had no further projects that could utilise it. It was a classic catch 22, we couldn’t get the projects without the experience and portfolio but the studio didn’t have the resources to spend getting them either.
I put forward a proposal to design a cinematic to pitch towards air taxi companies. During the 2022 Farnborough International Airshow, we had seen a boom in this sector with many different companies exhibiting their proposed air taxi designs. However, their marketing material was lacking, mostly a CAD model dressed up and slapped over stock city imagery that didn’t match up. So my idea was to pitch a digital city that was photorealistic so that any company could place their model into it and get far better results quickly and cheaply.
A lot to learn
My previous experience with Unreal was limited to a few model placements and plugin interactions.
Luckily I found the system quite intuitive with my many years of Cinema 4D experience helping and things started to fall into place quite quickly. Using assets from Kitbash3D I quickly put together the basis of the city that was to become the staging ground for the cinematic.
The first major problem that arose was simply the scale of this project. If this was going to focus on an air taxi, the camera angles would be high up which meant a certain amount of distance had to be filled to give the illusion of a city. Placing this manually would have taken forever so instead I applied a little movie trick, creating low resolution versions of buildings that could be duplicated en masse, essentially background cardboard cut outs.
Temporal technical jargon
Things were going well with the overall design. I’d created a custom air taxi design in Cinema 4D and moved it into Unreal successfully with only minor issues relating to textures that were soon fixed.
A second scene had been designed in Cinema 4D as well, a hanger with which to do a car advert style introduction allowing prospective clients a place to showcase their design up close.
But soon, unfamiliar terms relating to the rendering process started to hinder my test outputs. In simple terms, extra frames were being calculated to give better motion blur for the output but these extra frames affected the speed at which my air taxi’s rotors moved due to the way I’d designed the blueprint. It was way too fast, looking like a blur rather than a subtle spin. After some research I settled on a work around, adjusting the motion for the output settings rather than how they looked live. I would’ve liked to research this further and find a better solution but I’d been given a timeframe and had to keep to it.
Final touches
As Unreal is a realtime engine, planning and testing each cinematic shot was far easier than if I’d done this in Cinema 4D. I could set camera keyframes easily and see them happen instantly in front of me, adjusting as needed.
Mixamo characters were added, learning the import process for rigged characters along the way and a few custom textures were created to add a personal touch to a few elements of the city. I even threw in the odd sci-fi easter egg for the eagle eyed viewer as a bit of fun.
Each shot was rendered out, composited in after effects and graded for a more cinematic look. The final thought was music. I wanted the overall feel to be something akin to a high end car advert, more of an epic feel rather than corporate. To this end I avoided the upbeat guitar tracks seen on endless Kickstarter project sales videos and opted for a more symphonic sound.
The Result
I was extremely happy with the final animation considering the limited time I was given to learn the program and create the cinematic. This was about two weeks total from blank slate to final animation.
The project provided Ouno a basis to start approaching companies and offering this as a capability, with clients from the aerospace sector already interested in utilising the technology to market their own offerings.
For me, this was an intense learning process that really allowed me creative freedom to produce something that was completely my vision.
