Filmmaker Seeking UE4 Support

Development Character & Animation
,
1

Hey all,

I’m a filmmaker looking to work with UE4 on future projects. As I’m brand new to the world of UE, please forgive me for any naivety that may follow.

I’d like to render a couple of photorealistic characters and some environmental effects and composite them into my live action plates.

So I have two questions really:

  1. Thinking about my next project, how well does UE4 handle photorealistic fur? I heard it’s a challenge in UE4, but wondering if “challenge” means it’ll never look good, or can look great with the right team working on it.
  2. Can you recommend companies, or where I can post to find individuals at the top of their game who are capable of producing photorealistic results? Work that’s on par with the likes of Goodbye Kansas and Digital Domain.

Many thanks,

Herc.

2

Epic has a page on some stuff related to characters: Photorealistic Character | Unreal Engine Documentation

Hair is something that’s a bit difficult to do in a game, games usually use hair cards and there’s some info on materials for hair which can give them some more depth. There’s some more advanced hair stuff using systems like Nvidia Hairworks or AMD TressFX but those can look a bit weird sometimes.
Doing the more photorealistic characters take a lot of work, so be aware it’s not a simple task.

3

Thanks, darthviper107, that’s really informative. The results don’t look great, but still something I’ll explore further.

Does anyone have recommendations for my second question?

4

If you check Artstation you can look around and find some people who do good character work.

5

Maybe this person can tell you about something. The quality of hair he is getting is better, but requires engine changes at source code level. Check it out and talk with him: https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/1551217-order-independent-transparency-implementations

6

Thank you, all.