Continuing with the fine & talented team at Evil Eye Pictures, we had the pleasure of redesigning the intro animation to the Inside Unreal video series for Epic Games. Using artistic reinterpretation, the animation travels from a blank project, into a completed scene, and then dives deeper into the backend of unreal engine. A metaphorical trip “Inside” Unreal engine ;). Channeling the impressive film Powers of 10, we faced unique hurdles replicating the massive jumps of scale while retaining a smooth movement between maps. Without revealing too many secrets, the design task demanded creating assets with value at large and small scale. From concept, to asset creation, to final lighting, it was beginning to end truly enjoyable work. All rendered in Unreal Engine.

Stills from Video

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PROCESS

The design and animation of this sequence made use of a variety of software and techniques. Below is a summary documentation of the design process. Cinema 4D, Maya, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Zbrush, Unwrap 3D, World Creator, and the recent Datasmith import tools were used to create the various designs and animations seen in the video.

MOUNTAINSCAPE

The mountainscape took some trial and error before finding the ideal method for our purposes. I started the process by creating detailed displacement maps of individual mountains using world creator to be later used as brush alphas in Zbrush. After blocking out the base form in Zbrush, the displacement alphas were used to extrude a mountain layout. After exporting the high and low poly meshes from Zbrush, a lot of time was spent in Maya properly unwrapping the UVs of the mountainside into 5 unique UV spaces. This allowed for high enough pixel density per mountain for the close up shots. The UVs were spaced out into UDIM tiles and imported into substance painter. Using the baked normals from the high poly mesh, I used the curvature / ao / density maps to mask red, green, and blue layers in unique formations. This essentially gave us detailed splat maps of the mountainside that would be used as masks to apply tiling textures within UE4. This complicated workflow was necessary in order to get the maximum amount of detail at both macro and micro framing of the mountains.

NODES

The nodes represent the backend of unreal engine, the tools behind the scenes of your creation. These assets followed a more traditional asset pipeline. Starting with creating the low-poly in Maya, sculpting details on top of that in Zbrush, and then texturing in Substance Painter. This asset also required multiple texture sets in order to retain high detail during the dramatic scale shifts.

OBSIDIAN CUBES

PULSE MATERIALS

The “Golden Thread” that persists across every scene of the animation are the information carrying ribbons, represented in the pulses that change materials in the first two scenes, and the digital flowing ribbons connecting geometry in the others. Using substance designer, X-particles in C4D, and after effects, I created a variety of tillable assets used to bring the ribbons to life.