A Story of an RV
Technical Artist - Surfacing - Lighting and Rendering - Sound Designer
What was the project?
A Story of an RV was a small group project made rendered in Unreal Engine and follows a journey of an RV travelling through a canyon. The main narrative follows the vehicle whilst the impending threat of running out of gas looms. This project was made within a group of 5 within 5 weeks, from start to finish.
Working in Unreal Engine
A Story of an RV was unique to work with as we used Unreal Engine 5.3.2 to create this cinematic. What was unique however was how UE could provide us with the cinematics we needed to render and produce the animation. What really helped was the cinematic system in Unreal, which acted a lot like After Effects, which all 5 of us were familiar with. Unreal used key frames and had a similar structure in that each actor had a separate timeline that we put into a cinematic editor and could render out. To keep it cohesive we use Github to store our UE project and had good communication to make sure we didn't have any merge conflicts. To make the cinematics look great, we utilised Lumen and Nanite within UE, which allowed us to have good global illumination and AO effects, giving us more detail which would have been harder if we rendered it in Arnold for example.
Technical Challenges and Learning
We chose to have a cel-shaded art style which I was in charge of making the material for. This was hard as it was my first time really doing any form of tech art within 3D. I used a post-process material inside the post process volume which I set to infinite extent (unbound) so it would affect all cameras and level/s. Using this as a frame work I also developed an outline shader to go with it, which looking back I could've combined into one shader but having them separate worked perfectly for what we needed. This took me a lot of time to develop and was especially hard when I received feedback due to the amount of R&D needed for the changes. I also textured the RV and other various props but which was a challenged as following this style was more difficult than having a more atoned art style.
Post-Production
In post-production I mostly focused on sound, apart from producing the initial shot and making sure it was polished. We worked in a software based workflow as the editor was putting together all the renders, I was meanwhile doing the sound effects and working with the music. This worked really well and I it showed our learning within a small production and what we could do with good communication and milestones. Due to this we managed to finish early and even set up a small viewing with all our friends in one of the computer labs, which was great to be a part of. Overall post-production was quick but we learnt a lot about feedback and production standards which I still use today.
