#Reveal spire student movie#
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#Reveal spire student free#

How did you pull off Uplink's character animations?Д«endziute: We originally planned to use mo-cap animation and spent quite a lot of time experimenting trying to get it to work, but in the end, we couldnвЂ™t get the results we wanted. This creates soft, indirect lighting that can be positioned wherever you want. When this emissive is baked into the lightmaps, it will bounce around inside this box, get heavily diffused, and leak out the end into the rest of the environment. I created a few pieces of simple geometry where a scalable emissive plane is housed deep inside an opened-ended cube, almost replicating a box light. I created a similar mesh and set up emissive bulbs that contribute to baking to achieve nicer bounce light when baking while also allowing me to manually fine-tune where I want this diffused light in each shot.ДЄnother technique used in films involves box lights. For example, cinematographer Roger Deakins frequently uses his own ring of warm bulbs to create a soft light that diffuses throughout the environment. I did a lot of research into how films are lit and replicated a lot of the same techniques within Unreal Engine as opposed to lighting just using basic techniques. In general, I'm extremely into filmmaking and movies, which all influenced me heavily throughout the project, from themes to design, and most importantly, lighting. This all comes together to keep every section of Uplink feeling slightly new and fresh. I made sure to have fully exterior shots, interior with heavy exterior light, completely interior shots with no exterior light, and interior locales with minimal exterior light. The same idea goes for interior and exterior lighting.

I added things like the fluorescent blue/purple lighting in the arcade, the harsh red alarm lighting in the control room as well as the green hologram light spilling onto the surroundings.

#Reveal spire student full#

Going back to the idea of trying to stretch as much variation in the environments as possible, I took full advantage of this and tried to inject color and lighting-value variation throughout the cinematic without it feeling tacked on. We also used more elaborate 3D blockouts later down the line. I was responsible for the majority of these, and they were a lot of fun to put together! I tried to focus mainly on showing the tone and expression of each scene at this stage rather than the structure of the environments or character models. Shewayish: We used exclusively hand-drawn animatic-style storyboarding at first, eventually blended in some live-action footage we recorded at home. It took a lot of time and communication to come up with a story that everyone felt happy with. We spent almost half our time on just pre-production. Since we started our earliest concept stages around June, it took us just under a year overall, though the bulk of the work started in September.Д¬ould you share some of your story-boarding techniques?Д«endziute: This involved lots of going back and forth between ideas, lots of streamlining, and compromising.

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We had free reign to do pretty much anything! The only constraint was time. Shewayish: We were quite fortunate that the assignment for the final major project at Herts is very unrestrictive. This meant we had nine months to create an entire short film from scratch with a core team of four. What were the parameters around this project? Did you have time constraints? How long did the development take?Д«endziute: We had our third year to create the project, from the conceptualization phase to finishing the cinematic. Overall, creating a cinematic really allowed us to push the engine to its limits to create a much higher quality final product.

#Reveal spire student movie#

Creating a cinematic also allowed me to push Unreal Engine to its limits by using the movie renderer to render higher quality frames straight from Unreal Engine.

It also allowed me personally to fully utilize my time creating environments for specific shots that were much more linear and focused as opposed to a fully playable open game. We realized we were really capable here, enjoyed this aspect, and really wanted to tell a short story while also focusing all of our time into a much more concise, linear experience. We had previously made a gameplay demo with Spire last year and experimented with small cinematic sections within it. Although a lot of ideas were thrown away, this let us maintain the themes and ideas we liked among all the chaos to create Uplink. This really allowed a lot of free-flowing ideas to be bounced back and forth. Callow: In the pre-production phase of Uplink, we all tried to throw around as many ideas as we could, no matter how crazy they might be.