Case study
The Easy Job Part 2
In October-November 2024 I started working on another short Unreal cinematic.
-It’s a lot to balance. I’m working two jobs (PXO and the college) and with this on top of it, it’s a lot. Something had to give, and it was mostly my nightly workouts.
-My general workflow was something like this:
-Started with a rough script.
-Roughed in the animation with a mocap suit.
-Finished up the script as I was putting scenes together in Unreal.
-Did quick renders using Lumen.
-Once a complete rough cut was complete, I sent it out to my voice actors.
-It took about a week to get all the voices back. During that time I got the FX in place. All FX (exploding people, smoke, fire and cloth) was done in Houdini.
-Once the voices were back, I performed the facial animation with Metahuman Animator.
-I adjusted the animation, redoing some shots.
-Then I started rendering with Unreal’s Pathtracer. Rendering took about 1.5 weeks. It was slow going at first since I would stop my renders during the day while I worked. Eventually I set up my old computer to remote into work and had my main rig going 24/7, which made a huge difference. I put that 4090 to work!
-While I was rendering, I started on the sound FX. I had a subscription to Epidemic Sound which has a great selection of music and SFX, which I used a lot of.
There’s a ton of little mistakes here and there, but overall I was really happy with how it turned out. I really wanted to focus on characters, story and lighting this time.
The characters are from Epic’s Paragon game. It’s incredible how well those models hold up after all these years.
Metahumans were used for all the faces. They were lightly modified with Metapipe.
The Metahuman Rig was used on all characters.
This was done in 5.4. I’m excited to move over to 5.5 and see how Megalights holds up. Maybe I won’t have to use Pathtracing on the next one.