[WIP] UE5 Short Sci-Fi Horror Film

Temppe

Hi guys.

Very quick intro:
I've been doing 3d as a hobby in some form or another for twenty years. Nine years ago I wrote a screenplay for a short horror film. I tried to produce it six years ago but realised within a week that I didn't have the skills at the time. Two years ago I did a masters in games art and last May I finally got my first job in the industry (hard surface art for games). I realised during my masters that the time might be right to give this film another shot. My technical knowledge and my artistic eye are both far more developed now, plus the tools have evolved so much (I think the release of UE5 was the turning point). I started production six months ago, doing a few hours in the evenings when I can.

I'm using UE5 for rendering, 3ds Max, Fusion 360 and Zbrush for modeling and sculpting, Substance Painter for texturing plus a bit of Photoshop here and there. During the last trimester of my masters I made some of the characters for an assignment, though these assets will need to be reworked. I'm going to use Metahuman, but with custom sculpted faces that I'll make in Zbrush. This is because a) the off-the-shelf Metahumans suck, and b) I spent hours and hours over the last ten years practising character sculpting and I don't want to waste that work by using stock Metahumans, or scanned heads. I'll put a couple of screenshots of the characters that I made. These are Metahumans made with the Mesh to Metahuman tool in UE5. Forgive the not-so-great rendering, I made these toward the end of my masters when I was under a lot of pressure to finish them on time! I'm happy with the quality of the faces but the clothes in particular will need some love to bring them up to the same standard.

Hmm looking at the these now there are a couple of anatomy problems I might address at some point. Her zygomatic-frontal process is very pronounced. Anyway I'll tackle that when I tackle the other characters.

Last year I did some experiments using an array of old-and-shitty-but-super-cheap Playstation cameras and a program called iPi with some success. This is what I'll use to animate the characters, but I will need to collaborate with an animator to clean up the mocap and animate the fingers and small bits. I won't need to worry about that part for several months.

I also made some space suits and I'll put some renders of those below, but I might need to redo these. I made two of them, but one of them just doesn't look that good, and the other one would be too hard to animate. That said I might get some use out of the second one as a static prop.

During the summer I made an animatic that blocked out all of the shots of the film except the very last (and brief) scene. The running time is just over fifteen minutes, which is longer than I'd like but I've already cut so much from the story that I just can't shorten it more.

Right now I'm making the environments. There are two space ships, with most of the action taking place on one. It's divided into two principle compartments, plus an airlock. One of those compartments is the cockpit, where a crew of four have their stations.

It's a bit hard to see but it's in a conical section at the top of the spacecraft, a bit like the command module of the Apollo ship. These screenshots are out of UE5. I have a few more large props to put in here, and then a lot of wires, hoses, pipes, tubes, other small props etc.

I'm going to post updates here as I go. I'm going home for Christmas so you might not see any updates until January, but this project will still be alive and kicking.

Temppe

By the way I've started to make videos every few weeks explaining my workflow, and the last one I did was all about panels. I go over a bunch of techniques that you can use as alternatives to subdivision. You can check it out here:

https://youtu.be/cOQzh7g_E8Y

Temppe

It's been ages since I updated this. After Christmas I got around to finally finishing the instrument panels, which are barely visible in the last render. for the last few weeks I've been trying different techniques to quickly make messy/random hoses and wires. I got some nice workflows down, I think I'll share a video soon about how I did them.

Overall it's going slow. There are a lot of aspects of this project that are new to me - I'm gonna outline them below.

1) I'm designing as I go, whereas in my past personal projects and also most of my work projects, I work from photographic reference. It's very hard to freely design assets while at the same time being disciplined in scene organisation.

2) It's more like an environment than anything I've done before. I'm not an environment artist, I do hard surface and I've dabbled in characters. With an environment scene like this, there is so much more instancing, referencing, sharing modifiers, UVs, materials across different objects and it requires a different level of organising - see problem 01 above.

3) Constant stopping and starting. I'm doing a few hours every evening after work, but I can't do it every single day. It's hard to keep the momentum up. It's hard to re-orient myself after not working on it for a couple of days.

4) On the days when I do work on this project, it's after eight hours of doing the same kind of work for my day job. It's just hard to focus when it's been eleven hours of sitting on my ass tweaking UVs or something.

5) Despite having used Max for nearly twenty years, I still do find some surprises. For example I had no idea that some modifiers will enable themselves after Max restarts, but some won't. The Shell modifier does, and this caused me to pull half of my hair out trying to figure out why UVPackmaster kept crashing.

6) Sometimes I spend hours trying to figure out why something is misbehaving only to realise after a long time that it's a software bug and I need to restart Max.

Problems 05 and 06 are really compounded by problems 03 and 04. Like, really really compounded.

Having said all that, I was under no illusion that this project would be easy. I knew from the start that there would be days when I would want to punch a hole in my monitor. I've had a lot of those days recently - finishing the instrument panels was hell, frankly, because of the amount of cross-references between the meshes. But as often happens after a low period, then next week or two seem to go great. I had a lot of fun making the hoses and wires, and I think they turned out great. They add a lot of value to the scene for a low amount of effort.

Anyway I'm gonna press on. I've nearly finished this cockpit. After this it's onto the next room in the spacecraft.

Temppe

If anyone's interested in how I make messy/random wires, ropes and hoses, I've made part one of a three part series outlining the methods I use.