Early this year Epic Games showcased Rebirth, a cinematic created in real-time by Quixel.
The goal behind this project was to showcase a new breed of real-time environments that had the visual fidelity of a movie and the interactivity of a video game. This melting pot of mediums led to more than just a pretty video; it paved the way for further research into virtual production.
Virtual production is where physical and digital worlds collide. It is a new production process that merges physical objects like actors and real-world camera movements into real-time CGI rendering solutions like game engines.
This article exists to give an overview of Rebirth and its implication for virtual production. Check out the extended video breakdown of the project to get a detailed insight into how everything came into place:
Small team, big dreams
The landscapes in the project were made by just three artists, led by an art director and a visual effects supervisor. The artists had backgrounds in the game industry, the supervisor worked in the VFX industry, and the art direction was conceptualized by an architect.
This combination of skill sets and disciplines ensured that the project got the best of both worlds, by applying the creative process of a movie, where each shot was made individually, whilst leveraging the speed and efficiency of a video game environment creation process.
Each shot generally began with concept art, and from there a feedback loop between the art director and visual effects supervisor. Once the concept was approved, artists began work on it, with the art director and visual effects supervisor providing feedback along the way.
Leveraging the Megascans library, the art director was able to rely on the reference images of the actual scan location to efficiently photo-bash stunning concepts. This ensured that the concepts actually incorporated the assets that were already produced — this process created an unparalleled quality match between the concepts and the final product.
Putting things in motion
Hyper-realistic camera movement is key to achieving the subtleties of cinematic realism. This can be challenging and highly time consuming in a digital production when cameras are animated by hand.
To overcome this limitation and to simulate every subtle intricacy of real-world cinematography, a special VR rig was built emulating the shape, size and weight of a real video camera. Thanks to a custom written UE4 plugin, a professional cinematographer was immersed in the digital world through a VR headset, and shot all footage completely in-engine with all data recorded as keyframes.
This particular step is crucial for virtual production, where we want to merge the real-world and the digital world. These small, subtle movements help create an immersive experience for the audience, avoiding any artificiality, which can become jarring.
Scan data at the forefront of Virtual Production
To create a hyper-realistic world you need hyper-realistic assets, and nothing can rival real-world scans for this purpose.
Quixel’s Megascans, a massive scan library used extensively in both movies and games, was leveraged for all the environments, helping bring the project to new heights of visual quality and realism.
The world of Rebirth drew its inspiration from otherworldly volcanic landscapes. Quixel had previously gone on a large Icelandic scanning expedition to capture a diverse range of volcanic eco-regions, providing a comprehensive palette for digitally recreating Iceland. These assets proved vital to creating the photo-realistic backdrop for Rebirth.
The end result was a spectacular set of assets that was then composited in the digital world of Rebirth to create undiscovered lands and new worlds.
Having access to a vast library of high quality assets from day one is key to efficient virtual production. Furthermore, what is essentially a digital movie set can be easily converted into a video game environment in no time, truly maximizing the value of production.
Maximizing efficiency
The high-quality real-time rendering engine of Unreal Engine 4 and its ease of use allows artists to test many ideas in a short amount of time, virtually risk-free. From scene assembly and lighting to post processing and color grading final pixels, everything is done completely in-engine. For a project of the visual scale of Rebirth, but with few people and a very limited time-frame, this interactive real-time workflow was a pre-requisite.
SideFX Houdini played an important role in creating effects like volumetric fog, optimizing the assets for very specific needs and automating various manual tasks.
One of the most time-consuming tasks when creating environments is the manual process of importing each and every asset for every single shot.
One of the most time-consuming tasks when creating environments is the manual process of importing each and every asset for every single shot. This is where Quixel Bridge came into play; by automatically importing the textures and geometry from any given asset, whilst also setting up the shader.
Beyond Rebirth
As films, commercials and most visualized products become more and more ambitious, the current shooting process is starting to show its artistic and financial limits. The cost associated with traveling to specific locations, buying/creating equipment for these sites, licensing costs and permits can all end up spiraling the budget out of control.
Virtual Production plays a key role in solving these problems. Artists get to iterate more on each shot without having to worry about cost. This creates new opportunities for projects to become more ambitious with a fairly restricted budget still.
Pre-production, production and post-production all happen in the same phase with the same tools, with artists and programmers reviewing each step of the process.
Virtual production is the natural evolution of entertainment, and it’s just getting started.
