World Building - Unreal Fellowship

In November 2022 I was given the opportunity to join the World Building Unreal Fellowship and I jumped on it knowing how real-time rendering is becoming more and more relevant for VFX.

I've always looked at Unreal with interest but never really tried it. So, I joined the course with great motivation but very little knowledge.

I'll talk about the process and in doing so I'll give away a lot of what's in the video. So, perhaps it's a good idea to watch the result first!

You might have read similar stories told by other Fellows, and if this is the case you are certainly familiar with the random brief that each one of us received at the beginning of the course.

Fate decided that I had to build "a stormy icy landscape, with a tropical forest and a neo-classical pristine architecture. All captured at golden hour".

The dichotomic nature of these indications left me puzzled at first, but then an image started forming in my mind and I felt intrigued to the point that I had to reach for something to sketch it, even though it was getting quite late at night.

So, I grabbed a small notebook and a pen and I started scribbling, then I wanted to add some colours. So, I took a photo of my sketch with the phone and painted on it in Photoshop.

As I was drawing I thought, what if we add even more contrasting elements to this idea?

What if this place is a surreal, metaphysical?representation of ourselves?

I started liking the idea of playing with opposites, as I would be representing an inner view of human nature that looks like an outside view!

So, my mind started forming associations between the physical?elements and what they could represent.

Did I have to do that? Absolutely not, but I've found it intriguing and fun, and it provided me with some sort of structure that I could follow. So, this actually made the whole process much?more interesting and somehow straightforward...and it also helped me with selecting the right music.?

In my humble opinion, the strength of Unreal doesn't lie only in its incredible ability to fluently manage and render millions of polygons?with a pseudo-Global-Illumination look.?A big part of its value comes from the Market Place and, in particular, from the Megascans assets that can be browsed and imported with absolute ease.

Coming from a VFX company that?has created some pretty complex and expansive full?CG shows (JungleBook and LionKing to name just two). When taking the class one of my goals was to investigate the scalability and limitations of Unreal. So, having a project with multiple ecosystems crammed into a single set, seemed a good?testing ground.

First stop, the candy shop (aka Megascan Bridge)!

Obviously, I've thought: "let's test how detailed are?these assets" and I've downloaded the best possible quality for each one of them.

So, soon enough I hit the 16Gb limits of the video card.

Luckily I had Emanuele Salvucci and David Garcia, two diamonds from the wonderful Epic training team, that came to the rescue, explaining Virtual Textures and suggesting a non-destructive way to lower the quality of the 8K textures, which would reduce them to much lighter 4K ones instead.

Of course, now I dream about video cards that sport 128Gb of VRAM!

Anyway, luckily my exploration didn't have to stop there and I could give a test drive to the vegetation tool. The result was quite ugly but the process was fun. So, I've planned on doing it again with more care and intention, once I had a closer to final ground plane.

Moving further from the building I had to introduce the edge of the world. I did that with a very quick assembly of some large cliff assets. Three of them proved to be enough to establish the rock wall. I then added the gate pillars with the lions to mark the path that would connect the floating bridge with the building.

Once the main areas were blocked I went back to refine them. So, I've spent a bit more time on the icy side and asked my friend Lee Greatorex if he had any mountain tile sitting in his HDD. I needed something generic to put in the far background. Before I could say "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" I received this Gaea model in my Google Drive. Thaaaaanks mate!

Then I could look into the smaller scale and start refining the shaders, making sure that any object placed in the icy landscape would get some snow and frost build-up. At this stage, I didn't feel confident enough with the tool to use physics, particles or displacement, and I resorted to the most basic trick I could think of.

I tried to manage this assignment as if it was a paid job. Hence, I've approached it in stages, with the idea that I would have to tackle the most important aspects first and then focus on the details only if time allowed.

One of the most important things to realise when you create an environment is that you could spend months on details that won't be seen. So, it's always a good idea to get some cameras and basic lighting as soon as you have an acceptable set in place.

The time arrived for me to introduce a flowing water surface. I'm sure there are better ways of doing that, but given the time frame, I've decided to simply map a flowing texture onto a plane modelled directly in Unreal.

The following day we had a class about Niagara. So, I've learnt how I could set up a few particle systems to simulate the falling snow, the icy air moving through the landscape, the foam on the waterfall and the fire.

After a bit more work on the ground and on the scattered vegetation, I had to face my demons and start figuring out the cameras and the edit.

I'm very comfortable with photography, but I've never shot, directed or edited a film and the experience of having to do that was thrilling and terrifying at the same time. However, in the spirit of working outside my comfort zone, I've embraced the challenge and sketched a few shots with the Sequencer.

I've then shared the result with a couple of Fellows which work as film directors Sam Goldwater and Peter Gagnon. They once again confirmed their helpful and kind nature by sharing some useful and encouraging words. This gave me a bit of confidence and after a couple of days, I had a video synced with an ambient piece of music I wrote last summer.

It was the very first rough cut and it had a lot of render issues and poor editing choices, but it was an important step toward something that could resemble a music video.

Luckily I had another week to refine it further. So, I've shared the file with my lifelong friend and film director Alberto Gelpi, who gracefully gave me some mind-blowing feedback. In the space of 30 minutes, he explained some fundamental concepts of editing and visual storytelling that really changed the way I look at things. He also suggested some tweaks that made my film flow much better...sometimes little changes go a long way!

On the last day, I was in a very comfortable position because I had already tackled all the most pressing issues, but I didn't like the level of detail on one of the statues. So, I've bothered another friend by asking for another favour. Cristian Giuseppone is a fantastic modeller and sculptor and I knew it would take him just a few minutes to do those fixes...and I was right. After only 20 minutes he sent me the model back. Superstar as usual!

Once re-rendered that shot I was "done"...I mean, I had to accept this piece had to be abandoned to its current state.

It's far from being perfect, and there are plenty of things that I would like to change and refine, but I'm happy I could create something in a short amount of time, in a piece of software that I've never used before, and -most importantly- I met a lot of friends along the way.

So, how was this World Building Unreal Fellowship?

In one word: Amazing!

Learning a tool whilst you are trying to deliver something ambitious, under a tight deadline, under the scrutiny of very experienced and talented colleagues is a weird mix of excitement, stress, adrenaline rushes, and stress...did I mention stress?

I don't think I had a good night's sleep in 3 weeks and yet?I have very fond memories of this experience. Maybe my poor wife and son a bit less, ha!

Despite all the challenges, I feel I have added a very valuable tool to my arsenal, and I have opened doors to new exciting worlds.

I couldn't finish this article without stressing how incredibly professional, dedicated, hard-working and nice all the training staff has been. I could literally write pages praising all of them individually!

Here they are:

Julie Lottering , Brian Pohl , Cathy Cheo-Isaacs , Jamie Hurcomb , David I. García Emanuele Salvucci , Olivia Cefai , Gabriel Paiva Harwat , Natalia Torres , Franco Vilanova , Martin X. Bell , Cordula Hansen PhD , Peter Lish , Ramón Olivero , Bartosz Barlowski , Nicolas Counil , Elena Felici , Daniel Langhjelm , Paul Martin Eliasz , Giovanni Visai

A very heartfelt thank you also to the other Fellows that humbled and inspired me with their work and commitment, and to all the other people that supported me through this very intense but rewarding journey.

Love,

Marco

P.S.: Please let me know how you feel about what I've just shared. No one can progress without feedback. So, I'm keen on hearing from you all!