Unreal Engine Cinematic Work 2023

Hello everyone! My name is Piotr, I'm a Cinematic Designer and a recent graduate of the Warsaw University of Technology. Below you will find some of my work created in Unreal Engine, with which I've been working for several years. My area of interest mainly focuses on the blending of film and game development, where I try to practice cinematography, lighting techniques, camera animation, and designing environments using existing resources. I've tried to attach a small commentary to every project and references that helped me to achieve desirable results. Without any further ado, I hope you enjoy it!

'Eclipse Now' is a short cutscene that I created in September and October of last year. I was mainly focused on matte painting training (opening shot - sky refinement, adding birds and Eclipse scene enhancement), and utilizing Metahuman characters for the first time. Based on existing models, I built the surrounding environments, and set up lighting in the scene. I also tried out a camera tracking application for a more natural camera movement.

Metahumans were built based on Kaan Tezcan models, while After Effects was used for compositing (adding details, improving glow). Blender proved to be an important element in setting up animations, as well as the internal animation system in Unreal Engine, where animations from the Mixamo library were combined with ones created specifically for this scene (such as the red saber reveal).

The mood of the opening matte painting was mainly based on Iron City from Alita: Battle Angel. At the same time I was interested in exploring how I could utilize kitbash models and combine them with assets from the Epic Games project "Soul City." On the other hand, The Eclipse was heavily visually inspired by the Star Wars: Eclipse trailer, as can be seen in references.

Gray Knight was a project in which I wanted to partially recreate the atmosphere from the film Green Knight and explore the possibilities of lighting levels in Unreal using HDRI Backdrop. The compositing stage in After Effects was also significant step, where I additionally added lens blur on the sides.

The overall cinematography was quite simple yet effective for me because I was focused on creating this specific mood and atmosphere with light coming through environment elements.

Since '1917' is one of my favorite films when it comes to lighting and cinematography, I decided to do a lighting exercise with Unreal Engine. The project relies on recreating the camera from the film set and integrating simple matte painting into the environment, along with color grading the scene accordingly and trying out different lighting methods.

An interesting point for me was mixing Megascans materials inside the editor to accurately capture the look of the ground seen in the film.

My short film under the codename 'Prevista' is currently in pre-production, but I'm gradually achieving the desired look for characters and environment - in the case of the girl model seen here, it's a transformed Metahuman model using various rendering and postproduction tricks, including the application of real-time AO and cartoon shading techniques.

The biggest inspiration for me when it comes to creating my own animated film was initially the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots - especially episodes like "Jibaro" or "Fish Night" or Arcane, which I'm currently drawing inspiration from as I try to develop my own interpretation of those styles.

Last year, I attempted also to continue exploring the integration of Unreal Engine with filmmaking techniques by implementing other resources, in this case, emergency flare from the ActionVFX library. The key was selecting the optimal settings in the PostProcessVolume and adjusting the material settings to make it look more believable.

The entire scene and the theme of the red flare in the snowy environment were mostly connected to the game Long Dark and also inspired by elements from The Batman, Frostpunk, and The Last of Us.

'Midday', on the other hand, was a project focused on testing volumetric lighting in Unreal Engine - simulating the behavior of a flashlight or playing with god rays inside buildings in a dark atmosphere.

It was a scene that likely put the most strain on my computer; volumetric lighting, especially at cinematic quality, can slow down the scene, but here I was also mainly focused on achieving a visual style for the rendered file. The mood and atmosphere were based on many films, especially Alien.

'Titanfire' is a project that primarily focused on combining matte painting with Unreal Engine rendered file. The foreground created in UE was combined in After Effects with the background, which was created with the trees from the meye.dk library. It was an interesting approach for me due to the use of a tree library, which I had previously only utilized in architectural visualizations.

The scene was inspired by the final shot from the Titanfall 2 Trailer. The theme of mechs was also connected to the previously mentioned Love Death & Robots, specifically the 'Suits' episode.

These were the majority of the projects I managed to create in Unreal Engine in 2023. Of course I hope to create more interesting projects in 2024 :)

You can check out also my most recent Reel

Don't hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn

I'm also at: piotrnowakowski.com | Artstation | Behance | YouTube | Vimeo | Reddit