Title: Ev & Barrett Showdown
Video URL: ( Dropbox - Furious Elegance - Ev & Barrett Showdown.mov - Simplify your life )
Student Submission: No
Credits to sourced content:
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Fireball: Vefects Perfect Fire VFX ( Perfect Fire VFX in Visual Effects - UE Marketplace )
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Sky: Ultra Dynamic Sky ( Ultra Dynamic Sky in Blueprints - UE Marketplace )
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Armor Dissolve: Dissolution VFX ( Dissolution VFX Pack using Niagara in Visual Effects - UE Marketplace )
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Textures: Extreme PBR Textures (Blender) - ( Extreme PBR Nexus - Blender Market ) and Megascan assets
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Textiles: Outgang Textile Generator ( Textile Generator Pro - Outgang )
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Cloth/Clothing: Simply Cloth (Blender) ( Simply Cloth Pro - Blender Market )
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Rocks: Polyhaven Moss Rock Set ( Rock Moss Set 01 Model • Poly Haven )
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Spawner: PLUG Spawner ( Procedural Level Ultimate Generator in Blueprints - UE Marketplace )
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LUT (blended with Post Process): Cinema Specific LUT Pack ( Cinema Specific LUT Pack in Visual Effects - UE Marketplace )
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Background Meshes: Brushify Cliffs Pack ( Brushify - Cliffs Pack in Environments - UE Marketplace )
Screenshot of project in-editor:
Description / backstory to the piece / feedback around the challenge:
This is my first Unreal challenge, and I decided to do a (significantly truncated) scene from a script I’m working on.
There were a ton of things I wanted to try with this: seeing how many Metahumans I could realistically fit in a cinematic (300+ in the crowd for this scene), designing armor and clothes for the first time and learning that pipeline/process, Cloth Physics (ultimately failed), the new Metahuman Animator (flat lighting is SUPER important), actually scoring a scene (I’ve been a musician for most of my life, but have never actually scored something), and most of all, get a feel for what this process will look like once I start production for this series in full. Long way to go, but this was such an enlightening experience.
I have a much more realistic understanding of what this process will require now, and also realize that it’s totally achievable! It’ll be a lot of hard work, and will likely require a team of dedicated individuals to work with, but it is absolutely possible.
There was one shot with focus issues that reared its ugly head on the LAST day, of course. I suspect it has to do with the camera cut, but I ensured it was set to the correct Camera as well as the correct length and that the keyframes lined up. I have no idea why it didn’t work on the final export, although a test showed that removing the Render Camera Cut Warm Up setting fixed the issue, while causing a host of other issues. And only for this one shot! Every other camera cut was set up the same way. So weird.
This final render also SOMEHOW messed up the hair for Barrett (white hair). I’d done dozens of renders before, no issues. But on this one I guess he just rolled out of bed and onto the battlefield 
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Through this challenge I was able to establish a FLAWLESS pipeline between Blender/Unreal and Rokoko Studio/Unreal, specifically with skeletal meshes and animations. No more fumbling around with files, just export and it updates automatically. Beautiful!
This was also my first time rigging something manually (the wings) and I had a lot of fun experimenting with that.
I used Davinci Resolve to combine the pictures into video and add audio, but made no further adjustments.
Tried to frame the shots so that it could easily be cropped to 16:9.
Overall, this was an amazing experience and I will absolutely be participating in these again in the future.
Would love to hear any feedback the community has to offer!
- Engine version: 5.2.1
Update: I attempted to export the sequence as a video file directly overnight, but the file won’t play on my computer and can’t be imported to Resolve. Luckily, I read last night while it was exporting that as long as the visuals are untouched then this export should be fine, so I’ve corrected the initial black cut I made in Resolve and now the sequence coming out of Resolve is completely untouched from what came out of Unreal.