Unreal Fellowship - World Building V2

I wanted to share my experience and why everyone should consider joining future fellowships run by Epic for Unreal Engine.

Selection

To be selected for the Unreal Fellowship, we had to submit an application, portfolio examples and a 2 minute video saying something about who we are and what we want benefit the fellowship would bring to our practice. I explained that as the founder of an exciting creative technology company that has #unrealengine at the heart of its work, this would be a great opportunity for me to deep dive into the best practices for using the engine in our work. As a theatre lighting designer who is self taught on gaming engines I'm often unsure if my approach to using the engine is correct or based on knowledge from other workflows in the entertainment industry. It turns out it is a bit of both and this was a huge benefit, which I'll talk more about in the conclusion.

As my brilliantly talented colleague Andrew Voller is a genius when it comes to programming in Unreal Engine, it is often unnecessary for me to get involved in the "code" part of our projects, but my background as a 3d visualiser and CGI designer means that I can nicely complement Andys work by managing the look development and artwork. After many years working with DCC applications like #3dsmax and #maya I'm more than familiar with how to make beautiful shots and images in creative programs but have I translated this correctly into my work with Unreal Engine?

Going back to school is something I've never had a problem with at any stage in my career - continuous learning in this industry is absolutely essential. Although I've been using Unreal Engine for the best part of 4 years and have shipped many projects on it, you are never too far along to go back to first principals and understand better what you are doing right and wrong. This was my objective for the fellowship and it more than delivered.

Going "New" Skool

It was a requirement to have significant experience in the industry already to join the fellowship and the other fellows were experienced cinematographers, art directors, DOPs, writers, arch-vis artists and game designers. We were all there with the single objective to learn how to build "worlds" in Unreal Engine. The team at Epic provided an amazing learning platform for us with a wealth of training material, example projects, reference documents and useful links. We spent the entire 4 weeks in the same zoom link and this wasn't as bad as it sounds as the content was fascinating and we used slack in the background to chat, ask questions, share banter and examples of our work.

We were divided into teams led by experienced mentors and my team led by Olivia Cefai quickly found our harmony and camaraderie. Olivier would lead our group scrums and offer constructive feedback and project management tips and suggestions, as would all of our other fellows in the team who brought their experience and unique perspectives to the discussions when we shared our work. As a lighting expert, I frequently found myself drawn to comment on the quality of the light, tips on what to change or what worked well and it always surprised me how my theatrical lighting background gave me a unique perspective that benefited in a way that others couldn't. It turned out that we all have our own "superpowers" and regardless of what industry we are trained in, the skills translate across artistic mediums no matter what the end product is viewed on. This was a really important takeaway for me. Others were clearly experts in cinematics and some of the really helpful feedback from my team helped me learn more about cameras and look development in a way that no "real" school ever could.

A fellowship by definition is about bringing together people to work and learn together which is difficult in zoom link (or a metaverse as we called it!). Somehow, through the encouragement of the instructors and the solidarity provided through weekly showcasing of our work in progress, we all managed to find friendships and connections that made it feel like we had been in a room together for 4 weeks.

The learning was intense with a morning and afternoon session that usually involved different topics and the best talent on the subject giving us live instruction. Our Technical Artists, or Teaching Assistant (they never explained which the "TA" really stood for!) would sit on the lecture Slack channel and kept answering our questions whilst following along with the exercises to post tips that they had or screenshots of their settings so we could check we were keeping up ok. I have never experienced a "link dump" before but I now have pages and pages of useful links from the community which had been posted throughout the lectures.

Getting this first hand experience from the experts sets the example to us of what is best practice and how we should be setting up and running our projects. Frequently I had confirmation that I had unwittingly always been doing certain things right, without ever realising this was the case, and this in itself is a very useful takeaway. Equally, I am not ashamed to say that I learned a number of teqhniques that will improve my practice in the future and I couldn't help feeling several times that I wish I could go back in time and redo some of the work I had done previously but using these new tools instead.

At this point I need to send a special shoutout to senior instructor David I. García and the experienced and talented TAs who supported us including Franco Vilanova and Elena Felici who spend lots fo time on calls with me to help fix specific problems or just to talk through my project organisation. This was all brought together under the leadership of Brian Pohl and an amazing team dedicated to supporting us from Epic Games .

The Project

At the very start of the fellowship we were told that we would need to produce a portoflio piece by the end - something that we would show to the entire community through Epics marketing channels and the entire Unreal Engine community - no pressure then! I always wanted to do something that sat in my comfort zone as a theatre maker but knowing that this wouldn't challenge me. The instructors new this too and came up with a really interesting way of ensuring we worked outside of our comfort zone by using what is called a world building generator.

This awesome tool works like a Dungeons and Dragons style skills generator. You role the dice and the number will determine a modifier that is applied to your chosen style, theme, colour choice etc. It creates for you a really useful paragraph explaining your topic which can be put into an AI such as Midjourney to give you your first inspiration towards your final project. Mine was:

An Interior Recreational or Sports Space influenced by Fantasy / Fairy Tale / Folklore genre. Realism / Hyper Realism visual style will by applied on Entire Image with a Stained / Sepia Tones color palette. The architecture will be Tidy and will have strong influence of Art Nouveau or Art Deco built primarily with Living Organics (Plants. It will happen during High Noon with a Temperate climate and Light Snow / Sleet / Hail weather. It turns out our world has a Mythical Beings suprise twist.

Some of the fellows were really pleased with their choices as they didn't have many conflicts, but for me, having an Art Nouveau style built with living organics and mythical beings was not enough conflict to be discouraging but enough that I was out of my comfort zone. I quickly went back to my theatre ideas and thought about how I would create a piece of Metaverse Theatre with this set of design directions.

In one of those moments when your brain is slack because you are washing your hair or going for a walk - I can't remember where I was - I decided that the Opera version of the story The Flying Dutchman or Der fliegende Holl?nder by Richard Wagner would be a great place to base my design styles. Wagner was a famous Opera composer who literally tried to immerse his audiences in the story he was telling through the use of epic scenery and even custom built Opera Houses which were designed to focus the audiences attention in the world he had created. He was the original World-Building story teller and if he were alive today, he would have been on the Epic Fellowship and working out how to use Unreal Engine to build his Operas.

As I started to research the story, starting with poems by Milton and the myths from the sailors that created the legend, the complex backstory began to emerge that told the tale of the Greek and Roman gods waring for the right to maintain humanities right to exist, leading to an almost apocalyptic destruction through the use of the book of judgement which was sent to safety in the eye of Jupiters storm in the hold of Captain Vander Decker, the Captain of the Flying Dutchman. At the first Weekly presentation to all of the fellows I presented this story which you can watch a part of below.

Once the story was taken care of, the world wrote itself - I simply had to find the assets and build the world! Unreal makes it incredibly simple to "kit bash" by taking assets from the marketplace, Quixel and Sketchfab to allow you to quickly construct elements together into a layout for your story. I took a captains cabin asset and a solar system plugin from the marketplace and used this to frame my scene and start constructing placements that worked in the camera.

Throughout the process of building our project we were in 8 hours of lectures and talks everyday, so on top of the intensity of learning, we also kept finding new and improved ways of working that we then spent our evenings applying to our projects. It was all carefully planned to help us learn the right tools at the right stage of the project.

Learning how to properly use Nanite for managing millions of polygons of data inside Unreal was a very useful tool and we all took advantage of this powerful new feature that applies some sort of black magic to your game, breaking the conventions of decades of asset optimisation that was previously needed.

My final project was finished from a hotel room whilst on another project, struggling to give it my full attention whilst I was also trying to keep up with the projects and clients that Copper Candle relies on to grow and keep being successful. In spite of this feeling like a limitation, giving myself this focus in my "hotel command centre" allowed me to really work hard on delivering the final piece and using the tools we were shown to keep our project smooth and optimised, my laptop was more than up to the task of creating the final video which I submitted whilst travelling on a high-speed train back home on the final evening!

Concluding

I am incredibly proud of this project which is finished to a quality I haven't been able to produce in any other piece of work i've created in my 20 year experience of 3D CGI and visualisation. The feeling was shared amongst my peers in the fellowship, but at the showcase when I saw everyone elses work displayed too I realised that my work wasn't stand-out, they were all standout. Every single project was completely unique and different from the one before, but all were stunning, cinematic and client-ready if they were professional jobs. I can't tell you if this was the talent of the artists or the power of the engine - probably both - but the expertise and abilities emenating from the fellowship were palpable. It is like Epic had created a special forces squad dedicated to Unreal Engine operations with unstoppable force and ability. The thought of this cadre of talent going out into the industry with this set of abilities was like imagining a tidal wave of pure creative energy, forcing better work and practice into their respective fields. Then like seeds and branches, new work will flourish from others and content we consume in our games, films, TV and theatres will be orders of magnitude better because of what this fellowship contributes.

For myself, I went on a journey that would be extreme to call life-changing, but certainly career affirming. I discovered people who were "like-me" and a creative energy I haven't been part of before. I set out on this journey so I could learn the rights and wrongs of the tools I already use every day and in this "bootcamp for Unreal experts" I managed to affirm my experience and create new skills that makes me better at what I do for Copper Candle.

Learning that a lighting designer is a lighting designer in any industry or medium is reassuring for someone who still calls themselves a lighting designer even though they have been working in virtual technology for 15 years! Bringing my experiences to the fellows and sharing my creative understanding of light with experts from other industries literally enlightened me to the idea that my core talents are more than just transferable. I also discovered new things such as how to think about the camera in a virtual world, from other fellows who were creative and cinematic experts in their own worlds and who were able to share their insights with me through our regular feedback sessions. Not only did they do this constructively, they were incredibly generous with their knowledge like it was there for us to all use, instead of guarding it as a secret weapon to use on their own projects.

The final video from my submission can be found here:

and the flythrough breakdown is here: