So, I am new to this side of things, forgive me for my ignorant questions, I am a producer, but I am really interested in using Unreal to do “real time” VFX. My project is a $6M live action film, with tons of VFX, practically every shot is a set extension. We are aware the budget isn’t enough for most productions to pull this off. I am wondering if there is a financial or creative edge that Unreal offers that is practical for my production?
And there may be threads in here that I missed that cover this, feel free to link them. Want to be educated, hiring the right people.
1- Does Realtime VFX (green screen not LED) speed up a production and save money?
2- Is Unreal stable and reliable enough to bet on it?
3- Is there artist who can do photo realistic sets for film in Unreal?
4- What hardware is needed to do this? (I know PC, but what specs are best, HTC Vive I have seen, etc)
1). It most definitely slow down production but the idea is that it will save you time in post as having real-time set extensions available to the on set creatives should enable them to make the “right” creative decisions on the day instead of having the fix it in post mentality.
2). It depends entirely on what you intend to do with it - but I recommend thoroughly battle testing your use-case before production as the last thing you want is to a have a union crew standing by while you are debugging the engine.
3). Absolutely! I’ve seen some stunning work done in the engine by artists on these forums - I would suggest looking for talent on the job board here.
4). At the very least you will need a camera tracking solution, there are 2 flavors of tracking solutions available:
Inside Out tracking (Attached to the camera):
turn key solutions:
N-cam (Optical/RGBD)
Mo-Sys (IR)
Stype (IR)
hackable solutions:
Intel Tracker
ZED Camera
Any SLAM solution capable of retaining world orgin
Outside In tracking (External cameras that track your cameras position):
Traditional motion capture:
Optitrack
Vicon
Indie/Hackable Solutions:
Vive tracker
In short, it is hard to quantify the cost benefits right now and you would surely have to pay the early adopters tax but I think it is an indispensable creative tool.
Feel free to ask me more questions.
Thank you Josh, will probably follow up with more questions, but this gives me a good place to start testing and looking.