Making of PUMP

Software used and referenced in this article:

-Autodesk Maya 2023 / 2025 #autodesk

-Unreal Engine 5.3 #unrealengine

Introduction

'PUMP' is the fourth film I've made with the character I developed, Rusty the Robot. As always, I started with the music to inspire my visuals. Then, I found on the Epic Games Marketplace the wonderful Gym set which I thought would make the perfect settings for a musical. I chose to go with a daylight interior lighting scenario to give more of a feeling of realism (and it just looked cool!) and to keep manual lighting tasks to a minimum.

Most of my films will have a nod in some way or another to the Golden Age of Hollywood when productions were big and bold. I dedicated this film to Busby Berkeley and Esther Williams who gave us some of the most memorable scenes in movie history. Many of these films are shown routinely on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in the United States.

In this making of article, I will discuss the following topics:

• Autodesk Maya Non-Linear deformations
• High Quality Ray Tracing in Unreal Engine without Path Tracing
• Ultra Dynamic Sky for Interior Lighting in Unreal Engine

Non-Linear Deformations

I've been using what is now called 'Maya' since I started in computer graphics in the early 1980's. The original company was called Wavefront Technologies.

History Lesson Link

History Of CG

Ohio State University Press Book

(Thank you to Terrence Masson and Ed Kramer )

Ed Kramer was one of the first artists in 1991 to use in production the new Wavefront Non-Linear deformation tools in their 'Model' program.

For my film PUMP, I wanted to animate Battle Ropes in motion as well as unfolding Yoga Mattes. The rope and chain tools available in Unreal Engine just didn't cut it with what I was attempting to achieve. Maya was the solution.

In the Rodgers and Hammerstein play/movie, 'The King and I', there were some wonderful stage crafts utilized within the play/movie to simulate moving waves of water. It reminded me of the Battle Ropes and I thought it would make a great addition to my film to have something similar to this.

Contact me if you want the small Maya .mb files for these techniques.

High Quality Ray Tracing in Unreal Engine without Path Tracing

Creating high-quality images on a laptop can be challenging. It can also be very creative as you work your way through problems to fix shortcomings of the software. Given that I'm working on a laptop with 8Gb of VRAM (NVIDIA RTX 30), I'm having to be creative to keep render times below 5-8 minutes per frame and not crash the system. Doing a 9 hour path tracing render is not an option.

Here is my secret-sauce to creating high quality ray tracing for about 3-10 seconds of render time. Note, you will need to use DLAA along with these procedures. Please refer to my article 'Making Horror House' for instructions on setting up NVIDIA DLAA/DLSS.

1. Unreal Project Settings
2. Post Process Volume render settings
3. Adjusting reflective surface materials
4. Render settings in Movie Queue

First things you will want to do in UE5.3 settings is turn OFF the following which are not needed by Cinematic artists (your making a movie, not a game!):

• Allow Static Lighting
• Auto Exposure

Next, set up the Project Settings:

A note about how I use Post Process Volumes and Cinematic Cameras:

I control all exposure settings through the cameras' settings. I do NOT use a Post Process Volume(PPV) for exposure control. I only use the PPV to control all of the Ray Tracing settings as well as Lens Flares, Bloom, Vignette, and color correction. My camera controls all exposure AND Motion Blur settings.

Post Process Volume Ray Trace Settings:

WAIT! Is that it? Nope! When I first started rendering these shots with the mirrors, the reflections coming from the default LUMEN rendering were blurry or grainy with poor image fidelity. I tried Path Tracing which looked great but the render times were not manageable. How to fix this? You need to tell your reflective materials to 'talk' with the Ray Lighting Mode 'Hit Lighting for Reflections'. You do this in the material.

Edit materials that are highly reflective such as mirrors. In the material, search for 'reflection', and under Forward Shading, check ON 'High Quality Reflections'.

Before / After turning on 'High Quality Reflections' in material:

Rendering out your images with the High Quality Ray Tracing settings is accomplished with the following Movie Queue settings:

With these settings, I'm able to render frames in 3-10 seconds per frame with high quality and without using Path Tracing. Yes, Path Tracing looks better with less artifacts, but currently in pre-UE5.4, this was the solution that worked best for my projects.

Ultra Dynamic Sky for Interior Lighting in Unreal Engine

When I first encountered the plugin Ultra Dynamic Sky(UDS) found on the Epic Games Marketplace, I didn't know really how to work with it other than adjusting the light and making it rain. But the plugin has features I don't think many folks are aware of. UDS is not just for exterior shots!

Not an advertisement, but more of a professional recommendation: UDS is an indispensable tool for simplifying every-day lighting tasks in Unreal Engine and I recommend this tool as a lighting artist. It has one of the best uses of Unreal Engine in-engine documentation I've seen. Well done Everett Gunther!

To use UDS in my project 'PUMP', the first thing I did was rip out 90% of the lights that came with the Gym set (Remove ALL distant/sky/atmo/HDR lights prior to using UDS). After adding the UDS Blueprint to the scene, I did some simple adjustments to the Sun intensity and angle and then went to work on the UDS settings for interior shots.

Before and After shot results using UDS

Ultra Dynamic Sky Interior Settings

After you place the UDS Blueprint into your scene, scroll all the way down in the Blueprint to the bottom where you will see section N1 of the tool.

Interior Adjustments does not come turned on, you must enable this feature by checking ON the 'Apply Interior Adjustments' Once you do, you might be surprised as how much fog your get inside your set. Start to tweak the settings as you require. In my film, I chose to have a very natural daylight illuminating much of the interior shots and kissed in atmospherics per shot by adjusting the fog levels inside the sequencer.

In the end, I was able to use UDS as 95% of my light source for the film and supplementing shots here and there with a few Spawned Fill and Bounce lights. Deep interior shots will still require adding lights to the scene as the UDS will not fully reach that deep inside.

Note, for many of these interior shots, you can get rid of any dynamic sky and clouds and turn off ALL cloud animation and cloud shadow animations. No need to increase render times where you don't need to! You will also get more predictable lighting results when you are not scratching your head as to why the lighting changes over time because there were moving clouds outside when you don't need them to animate.

Conclusion

Production of 'PUMP' took me 58 days in total on my laptop. It was a very enjoyable project to create and I'm always delighted to share the magic of Hollywood's past with new artists.

I wish to thank my graphics partner, Jeff Shank for the poster art and additional graphics and for his insights and ideas during the production of this film.

Knowledge is like manure. It's meant to be spread around.

Peace