Session:Using High-Quality Cinematics To Nail Your Pitch Without Breaking The Bank - Robert Craig.

[music] [music] Okay, so next up we have Robert Craig from Super Massive. Uh, Robert, where's Robert? Rob. Oh, there we go. Here you go. Um, who is going to talk to us about using high quality cinematics to nail your pitch without breaking the bank. I like that. Absolutely.
Uh, hi everyone. Nice to be here today. Um, I'm Robert from Super Massive. I'm the studio art director there. Um, so I support all of our projects uh in the creative and artistic areas. Um, Super Massive, in case you've not heard

of us, we make uh dark fiction horror games that are narrative adventures where the players kind of interact in the story and make choices. Uh, but just in case you're not familiar with our stuff, I've prepared a quick uh reel to take a look at. Heat. Heat.

Heat. Heat. [music] Okay, so that's some of our past and future projects from Super Massive. And what this talk is really about today is um how we can get ideas across. Uh it's a big part of what I do there. And um

that covers both creative aspects and technical aspects. And uh the project I'm going to talk you to you about today uh was conceived as a way to to do that with our teams. So, um, when we were looking at moving to Unreal 5 as a studio, um, I'm sure a lot of you have experienced this. Sometimes game dev teams can be quite set in their ways, the way they've always done things, and it can be hard to break away from that. So, I wanted to do a trial project where we could test out some new workflows, new ideas, new ways of doing things, and use that as a sort of visual showcase to get the teams excited and to to kind of inspire them for our next round of games. Um but the problems with that was uh when I suggested the idea we were busy with a lot of other projects and a lot of other games. Uh so there wasn't much budget available and there was no team available and I also had to uh keep going with my day job. So it was uh the old games industry thing of uh nasty old realism raining on my parade again. But um I wanted to do it anyway. Uh so so pressed ahead and in doing so I found

that a lot of the newer tools that have come into the engine recently uh specifically Unreal 5. I'm talking about here of course really made this uh task more more efficient and uh you know to get better results than I thought. So I want to talk a bit about that today. And and the two main things that I've uh kind of seen is that the the quality gap is is really um closed between Unreal and previous tools I might have used to do this work before like uh you know Maya Arnold that kind of thing. And there's been a democratization of some uh uh technically uh challenging processes that used to be very expensive and [snorts] very difficult. They're now much easier and more attainable in the engine. So, so that's kind of what this is about. And it just means that I think ideas can go bigger. Um you you can iterate things faster. You can see results straight in in the engine and get to a better place artistically. And it's a great p canvas for for prevising your ideas, for trailers, uh for for kind of almost cutting the line and jumping ahead to quite a final visual very early in the process. So, so that's

kind of what this is about. And the work that I'm about to show, it kind of it kind of started off with this brief, but ended up kind of being a labor of love. It was a really uh fun project to do, and it was then used as something to kind of challenge these workflows and and ways of doing things, the studio, which we're now kind of yielding uh good results for. But it was also a great framework for other projects and other uh pitches and trailers and things that we've done since. So without further ado, um let's take a look. Oh, it didn't play. Let's try that again. Bear with us. It would be really bad if this doesn't play because the [laughter] whole thing's kind of about this uh I do have a backup video um on a memory card that I could go and get, but

um yeah, sorry about this everyone. Yeah, it's funny because the last one worked. Okay, so I thought this one was the same way. Bear with us. All right.
Get it to play.
Um, okay. Well, uh, okay. Well, I guess it's kind of going to be a bit pointless, but basically I and was going to just go on and show

some some making of um but I think without seeing the actual video, it's probably not ideal. Um let's see if I've got any images of it. I I'll skip ahead to to this where we can kind of see the process in Unreal. Um, so the idea was to come up with an idea for a shot and and you know kind of find references, sketch it out, then block out that environment in Unreal here with kind of big shapes first trying to get the broad composition. Um, and then look to set up what I'd call the scene photography. So get all the camera settings and uh the base photography in and and look at the the sky and the lighting and that kind of thing. then to specify the um final camera and lens. And once that was done, we'd add the nanite geometry and get all the the high poly stuff in that lights a bit better. And then I used a sort of uh library of um XN's animation that I shot for this uh to kind of add character to

then get the final shot. So you can kind of see the end result here. Just imagine that moving and you're kind of there. So the idea was for it to feel quite big but be really efficient in effort because it was it was kind of not much budget to it. So some of the principles were to build everything to camera. So to kind of get the camera in early um and to then only work to that to try and make the most of library assets that are available uh things like mega scans and other libraries and to pick your battles and choose uh to to spend time on what really made a difference in the shots and and to kind of know when the time was right to move on. And the key tech in Unreal that really helped with this project uh was was Nanite to allow to get models in a bit quicker. So we could kind of sometimes come straight from sculpt and not have to go through rettopo and that kind of thing and build the scenes a bit quicker. Uh Lumen to be able to iterate the look and the lighting really quickly with kind of real-time update mesh to Metahuman. It's really the key one. It allows you to take advantage of the Metahuman rig uh for both body and face

but to use your own custom character within that and it's really effective. and then metahuman animator which lets you get quite high quality mockup um for for body and face within the metahuman system. Um so in terms of the environments I'll just give a quick make of. So here's one of the final shots in Unreal. Uh you can see and how this would be put together would be to have large chunks in Gaia uh for the mountains uh that you can see in the background here and then to have a small detailed area that would be close to camera here and that would be filled with uh usually photoggramometry either mega scans or assets that I'd create myself. Um and then very kind of close-up uh areas would get foliage paint and that kind of thing and you'd get that kind of end result. Um, so it really kind of like I say, prioritizing what's uh near to camera. Um, and same for interior. So just blocking the big shapes and then looking to fill out the detail with library assets. Uh, so for the characters, uh, the process I use

was um, what I would describe as digital casting was to to look for online resources such as 3D scan store, shout out to them, to uh, find a likeness that you um, appreciate for for the character you designed and then to ingest that scan into Metahuman. uh then to um work on shading and uh all that kind of thing to get your your final result. So here you can see on the left the raw scan ingested into the metauman system and on the right the final character after all the texturing and makeup is applied and the second character um the big win for us really was in uh the lighting and camera workflow uh which we're now using in the studio. So it's a physically based workflow and how it works is to simulate real shooting conditions. So to kind of choose your time of day weather and everything that you want and then to model uh the um assets in Unreal from real world data. So here we'd take the lux value for whichever time of day we wanted and get that into the directional light in

Unreal and then use that as a cue to um to meter all the other elements. So here for example the HDRI used in the scene is metered to the lux of the directional light and then we use manual exposure to make sure that photography that's seen all that makes sense for the kind of conditions that we're simulating and what you get with that is a relationship between light and camera that is then tied and you can um adjust the photography shot to shot to get the results you want. So here's one of the the final shots from the video that we didn't get to see um and here example as well. So you can see here the aperture of the camera is just being opened up to get the right sort of amount of light exposed to get the final shot. And the top right corner there shows the the raw um that is the scene for that. Um so so that worked super well for us. We're using that for a lot of projects now. It gets really realistic results and it's very easy to do. Um in terms of the uh sort of character lighting for the final shots, it was quite minimal what had to be added. But you can see the the difference here from left to right with

just the base um environment lights and then the final result with extra sort of character focused lights. Uh and then onto the performance capture. So uh how we got the animation and data in um was uh the body data was shot with XNS which is um a mocap solution that we have within super massive to uh do quick turnaround moap. Um, so we created a sort of library of different bits of body animation that could kind of go within all the scenes and then used the uh Metahuman Animator app uh from from Epic on the iPhone to capture the face uh which you see a little example of there of some of my amazing acting. The secret source for this is to use the head movement that you get from the phone. Um, I think a lot of people would just take the body and use all of the body animation to get the character performance. But if you take the head movement, it tying together the facial expressions and the way the head moves is really key to avoid an uncanny valley and you can just disable the bones from the neck app on

the met human rig and um, import it from the face performance instead and it gets really good results. Um, and I would just like to say a big thanks to Salem Baxter who played the main role in the video that we again didn't get to see unfortunately, but she did an awesome job. You can just take my word from it. Um, so so that's it for me. Um, again, apologies that the video didn't work. Um, but the the idea was about producing something uh that feels really quite high quality in a way that's flexible, is is really cheap and requires a small team to shortcut towards um final visuals um to to kind of really help prevision ideas on projects or or use for trailers. And it's it's kind of a great equalizer if you've got a small team because you get access to tools and tech that previously were very unattainable. But if you're lucky enough to have a big budget or big team, this just means you can go large and and scale up and do something even more ambitious. So, uh, thanks again. Um, come and have a chat with me afterwards and say hello. It'd be great to meet some of you. Uh, and that's it. Unless there are any questions.

Thank you very much. I I thought that was f I know you I know you didn't get so but I actually think you gave some a really good insight in terms of using existing tools which are very accessible and how to apply them using very simple techniques and you know the the level of quality which is obvious simply through the stills about the impact that you can have with kind of landscape views with facial views you know the tools like Metahuman like graphite all those things to be able to take the assets you've got and make them interesting for me. Um, most of the trailers I had to make were all around like small multiplayer game. I mean, we had a few cozy game things to do as well, but I only had the resources of the gameplay footage. But that's okay because you frame the the moments in the story. You think about in that praise, where am I going to get the awareness? How am I going to grab the attention of the viewer? That's to me is the important factor. It's grab

the attention of the viewer and tell them the story that makes them want to actually go found find out more. And you don't have to do that with all of the graphical intensity. But it turns out you can have the graphical intensity even if you're a smaller studio. So for me, I think you did a smashing job with that. Just [snorts] wanted to say that. Anyone got any questions? They got a question over here. I saw the hand go up over there first.
Hello.
Uh thanks so much. a really beautiful presentation and yeah, all the shots of all the games that you showed look absolutely gorgeous. Um, I have a question related to that. I feel like we've known that film and games are getting closer and closer to one another. Um, historically, I think a lot of game developers have taken inspiration from film. Recently, we're starting to see Hollywood kind of notice, wow, these game guys, you know, they know two, they know a thing or two about telling stories. Are you guys starting to see any,

you know, questions, interest from Hollywood where they're saying, "Hey, we have a movie idea, but we want to make a a trailer first. We want to make a game idea first. Are we seeing previous land appreciating what games can do and what we can do with engines?"
Sure. Absolutely. I do think that's happening. I think the the crossover of ideas is is kind of becoming a lot more equal now. I think when when I started to get into this stuff, so I've been at Super Mass of about 13 14 years and it was very much let's look at what they do in film and see if we can bring that to the world of games and try and do as well as we can with that. But I mean recently we've seen so many uh games kind of cross over into this into the cinema space, right? And we've seen um you know movies that that aren't even a game but ideas from gaming kind of permeating them. I mean, if you look at something like um 1914, the the World War I movie, that's the Oneshot. To me, it feels so so much like a game in some scenes, it could it could be kind of a big budget shooter. So, I think we are seeing that a lot. And we we have uh you know, seen um some teams from the film

world, you know, get in touch early and and look at, you know, some IPs before they're even out there. So I think the the world of cinema is looking to mine uh you know ideas and cultural things within gaming as a sort of new new new kind of trend. Yeah.
I mean I don't think it's that new. A few years ago I interviewed the uh woman who did the interstellar black hole. Uh I interviewed a whole bunch of people from frame store double negative all those kind of guys. And they are exactly the same skill groups that were doing the VFX in games. They are literally in some cases people who've switched between game teams and film teams. But I want to challenge that. I don't think film is the people we want to be talking to. I don't think film have done a great job of of handling the value of an IP for a game. The ones who've done the best jobs have been TV shows, Fallout, Last of Us, things like that. And actually, what we should be connecting ourselves with is soap operas, not film. Because soap operas match is the

audience's behavior in the games environment, not film. That's not We don't mostly play games and then leave them. We want to stay
a bit more long form narratively generally. So So the the TV kind of show model sometimes is a direct fit. When when we did Until Dawn, we looked at the TV show model for the narrative. So we split it up into sort of 12 episodes and tried to write the story that way. I think you've seen it's quite quite a natural fit like you say with Last of Us and
I think you've hit a really important nail is that we don't have to be one thing. There are so many options. I mean there are I mean don't get me wrong I mean Last of Us as a game does have that more film narrative but it also creates those barriers. I I mean we're talking about narrative here rather than visuals, but we have the capacity to make to create anything we imagine. And the tools make it incredibly accessible for us to be able to communicate that to everybody in our audience. We should just be doing more experiments. Anyway, Bob, thank you so much. That was amazing.
Thanks everyone. [applause]