Hey guys! We are the 3DXR Lab from Chung-Ang University’s Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science, Multimedia & Film. We’re the team behind the animation, and we wanted to share a bit of a devlog about our Unreal Engine production process.
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The way this project started is actually pretty awesome. T1 reached out to our lab with a request—if we could create a highly realistic, Unreal Engine-based animation to be screened at “Homeground,” their annual event for T1 fans.
We gathered a strong team. Our team has one Director - our professor- and seven students with unique strengths. While brainstorming the concept together, we decided to go beyond just making something visually stunning.
We all agreed on a story - the fans and the team supporting each other. We really wanted to capture that special bond and show how players and fans give each other strength. As a protagonist, we created “Nauri”, a devoted T1 fan.
There’s also one massive detail we absolutely have to mention for this project: we actually 3D scanned the real T1 players! We recreated every member of the T1 roster as real-time Metahuman characters in Unreal Engine, so they could live and perform on-screen with the same energy we love in real matches.
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Here’s how we put this whole thing together:
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1. Metahuman
1-1 : The T1 Players: We went with photogrammetry and the Mesh-to-MetaHuman pipeline. Raw 3D scans can come out pretty unclean, so we had to mix in some other data to fix up the broken parts. But honestly, getting them to actually look like the real players mostly came down to tweaking the skin textures (Basecolor). It’s surprising how much of a difference one texture map makes.
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1-2 : Nauri (Main Character): We sculpted her face from scratch to give her that relatable, everyday look. When we first tested her facial animations, her expressions felt a bit too exaggerated and uncanny. So, we spent a lot of time in the Expression Editor, manually fixing the blend shapes so her facial muscles moved more naturally.
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2. Hair & Clothing
2-1 : Hair Pipeline: Hair was all done using Maya’s XGen. To keep our scene from getting super heavy, we figured out a Groom pipeline that let us basically copy-paste hairstyles across different background extras.
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2-2 : Clothing: We made the clothes in Marvelous Designer. We actually went back and watched 2025 live streams just to see how each T1 player wears their jacket (ike who zips it up, who rolls up the sleeves).
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3. Environment & World Building
3-1 : The Stadiums: Instead of manually placing and animating thousands of tiny lights, weused Blueprint-driven emissive materials and UV animations. It basically automated all those crazy LED stadium effects for us.
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3-2 : Seoul Streets: We really didn’t want the city to feel like a digital asset stack. We laid things out with Spline meshes, threw some dirt decals on the ground, and added super specific stuff like Korean city buses. We also tried to sneak T1’s red color into random street props like fire hydrants just to tie it all together.
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3-3: Nauri’s Room:
For her room, we wanted to show what she’s going through without explicitly saying it. So, you have this really chaotic, messy desk that shows how stressed she is about job hunting, but then the rest of the room has her T1 merch and old art supplies to show what actually makes her happy.
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4. Cinematography & Layouts
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4-1: Pre-viz: We made pseudo-finished videos every week to check how the movie actually plays. Movie Render Queue helped us a lot, since it allowed us to render from multiple levels with a click. We even drew a “Tension Graph” to grasp the whole picture of pacing.
That’s actually why we decided to put the viewers into a losing situation for the AL match. Back then we were trying to arouse feelings from the very beginning, but it wasn’t engaging at all. We simply started from the scene when T1 is being beaten.
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4-2 : Camera Work: Our main rule was basically: “Epic matches, pretty Nauri.” For Nauri, the camera was always focused on capturing her subtle feelings. But for the games, we tried to get as creative as we could with the angles, like shooting through the tiny gaps between monitors, going super low when they were winning, and shooting top-down to make them look small when they were losing.
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5. Motion Capture & Animation
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5-1 The Setup: Animating 8 minutes by hand would have taken forever for us, so we used OptiTrack for body mocap and Live Link Face for facial animation, bringing it all into Unreal in real time.
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5-2: Cleanup & Rigging: Raw mocap data is hardly used due to the errors. We used Additive Layers in Unreal to fix the weird arms or necks without overwriting the original acting. We also made “Pose Assets” (like different ways to hold a mouse) and used Control Rigs to make sure stuff like headsets actually stuck to the characters’ hands.
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5-3 : The Crowd: Hand-animating a whole stadium wasn’t going to happen. So, we made an Animation Blueprint that just randomly picked cheering animations for the MetaHumans, and then we baked a fixed hand pose over it. It ended up looking surprisingly natural.
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6. Lighting
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6-1 : Lumen & Raytracing: Lumen and Ray Tracing were amazing features. We’d set up about 90% of the overall lighting for the level, then drop in spawnable lights for specific shots to achieve consistent lighting.
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6-2 Narrative Lighting: We really tried to show how Nauri was feeling. After she fails her interview, we made the room dark and heavy. But when things are looking up, we gave her this nice, warm morning sun. Out in the city, we used the digital billboards as key lights to focus on her.
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6-3 : Faker’s Arc & Finale: When Faker is struggling the most, we literally left half his face in the dark to show that crushing pressure. When he finally snaps out of it, we put this warm red backlight on him from the crowd. For his big final plays, we pushed the lighting into these intense, contrasting colors to make it feel almost like a fantasy. And for the trophy lift, we hit them with golden lights but mixed in some blue so it wouldn’t look too yellow and muddy.ㅤ
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- Thank You!
Thanks so much for reading through all this! We really poured everything into this project, and we hope you guys like it. The official animation will be dropping soon
You can check it out and support our team on our YouTube channel here
