Hi everyone, happy new year!! Happy to share my first cinematic. I learned a great deal with this project. Goal was to learn more about physical lighting, exposure, manual camera control, materials and sequencer in Unreal. Another thing I wanted to do was switch to OCIO / Acescg and DaVinci Resolve, I love this new tool.
I wanted to capture the Lotus design thinking Simplify, then add lightness. So the idea came from aircraft wings. Spars to show lightness and engineering in harmony with simple nature on the other side.
Location is a fictional secret testing facility.
Enjoyed making volumetric fog cards and light shaft materials using custom textures from Designer. Made a fake GI setup with a bunch of spotlights to give that extra punch to overall lighting. Car model not being CAD I took some creative freedom and customised head and tail lights, real challenge was to fix the glass material with a custom mask since the one that came with the car was low res so I ended up making a 4k mask for front and rear windshields / side glass.
Since my hardware is not powerful enough to handle Raytracing, seeing real-time feedback on car was expensive so I kept lighting mostly diffused but gave it enough coverage to see details. Used both Raster and Raytracing Translucency. Lighting channels came in handy for lighting up rims and certain areas on the car.
Overall it took about ~11 hours to render including movie from Resolve.