'Last Chance'

OVERVIEW

This piece forms part of my final exam project at Visual Magic, which was spread over a 6 week period.  I've predominantly worked with Unreal Engine for stylized projects but felt it was time to lend my hand at trying to create a photoreal cinematic trailer within UE5.1

When I started my education at Visual Magic, I saw the notorious Re-Birth cinematic trailer and wanted to see how close I could get to replicating it at the end of my 2 years of study.  I've extensively referenced scenes from my source material, but with my own twist on certain shots.  The narrative and voiceover are my own but based around Re-Births' core theme.

With the exception of film grain, everything is rendered in-engine.

STORYBOARD

As I was looking to closely replicate the Re-Birth cinematic, my storyboard consisted of the majority of environmental shots from my reference source.

VOICEOVER

I chose to adopt my own voiceover script for this project as the timing was different to that of the original, and composed of fewer shots. As this was the case, I kept to the same theme as my reference but with my own twist. 

OBTAINING THE PHOTOREAL LOOK

There were a few factors in play here but the 4 main criteria to achieve the photreal look are as follows:

* 4K textures (utilising photoreal assets)
* Ray Tracing
* Runtime Virtual Textures
* Parallax Occlusion Maps

A dose of 2:39 aspect ratio also helps...

FOG & ATMOSPHERICS

In order to create the fog/atmospherics within my scenes, I used a combination of the following:

* Fog Post-Processing Volume
* Fog Cards
* Fog Multimedia Cards

The  fog post-processing volume was particularly useful for the camera mounted shots on the vehicle and for general ambience.  Intensity of the fog post-processing volume and cards was accordingly tweaked for each scene/shot.  

SCENE LAYOUT

Due to the fact I was creating very specific shots, the environments were geared to only look complete through the eyes of the camera lens.  As this was the case, the levels could be rather abstract in appearance when viewed at a distance.

SCENE OPTIMISATION

The scene above is taken from the opening shot of the cinematic, utilising only 2 autolandscape materials and 4 different meshes. The efficient optimisation of each scene was a challenge I set myself and high on the list of priorities. In general, textures were set at 4k for close-up shots and then drastically reduced when in the distance and/or obscured by fog.

CREATING DISTANCE MESHES

Quixel has an extensive range of Icelandic assets but no distance meshes.  As this was the case, I had to use the services of Open Topography and create my own.  At present, LiDAR data unfortunately doesn't exist for Iceland, therefore landforms from Alaska were used as the closest alternative.  To process the point data, I used a LiDAR setup within Houdini and then exported the mesh and textures over to Unreal.

CLOSING

Although this has been a heavily referenced project, it has benefited me greatly in furthering my understanding of photorealism and rendering within UE.  Time did prevent some final polish on the majority of the scenes but it was always great to have a point of reference to follow and match it, to the best of my abilities.

My hat goes off to Joe Garth and all the teams involved in bringing Re-Birth to the masses.  It has greatly inspired me to want to learn and try to master Unreal Engine and I have no doubt it will continue to do the same for many other inspiring artists.

A link to Joe's ArtStation is provided here: https://www.artstation.com/joegarth