Earthen Ambush
The Project
A quick shot I created at Parallel as part of a video series designed to showcase and expand on different scenarios and the lore from the IP's universe....
A quick shot I created at Parallel as part of a video series designed to showcase and expand on different scenarios and the lore from the IP's universe.
- Direction, Animation, Layout — Mobo Boehme
- Art Direction — Oscar Mar
- Concept Art — Cristiano Rinaldi / Oscar Cafaro
- Produced by — Parallel //
Working in Unreal
I decided to give Unreal Engine a try due to its power when it comes to performance. I knew I wanted to go for a huge forest type of shot, and I wanted to test how it would perform when rendering in Lumen, which is always a sacrifice you need to have in mind when working with huge forests....
I decided to give Unreal Engine a try due to its power when it comes to performance. I knew I wanted to go for a huge forest type of shot, and I wanted to test how it would perform when rendering in Lumen, which is always a sacrifice you need to have in mind when working with huge forests.
Environment
Even if it was a bit overkill for this project, I wanted to take the opportunity to test how far I could take Unreal's shading tools and the integration of landscapes from Gaea with plugins like Ultra Dynamic Sky for cinematic purposes.
It resulted in a really handy scene that I could interact with pretty smoothly....
Even if it was a bit overkill for this project, I wanted to take the opportunity to test how far I could take Unreal's shading tools and the integration of landscapes from Gaea with plugins like Ultra Dynamic Sky for cinematic purposes.
It resulted in a really handy scene that I could interact with pretty smoothly.
Assets
Luckily for me, I could reuse the assets that were already created as part of the Parallel library — in this case, beautifully designed by Cristiano Rinaldi and Oscar Cafaro....
Luckily for me, I could reuse the assets that were already created as part of the Parallel library — in this case, beautifully designed by Cristiano Rinaldi and Oscar Cafaro.
Animation
We only needed a couple of animations for the spaceships, and a quick one for the assault vehicle. However, even for smaller things like these, it's worth it to properly animate the characters, or the whole visual coherence would break.
In order to do so, I used Blender to roughly skin one of the costume designs already created at Parallel to match the MetaHuman rig. Then, I just animated it by hand for the shot....
We only needed a couple of animations for the spaceships, and a quick one for the assault vehicle. However, even for smaller things like these, it's worth it to properly animate the characters, or the whole visual coherence would break.
In order to do so, I used Blender to roughly skin one of the costume designs already created at Parallel to match the MetaHuman rig. Then, I just animated it by hand for the shot.
// Thanks for watching
