overview
NUKE was a quick 30 second short film made using Unreal and Virtual Production. I worked as the technical director, meaning I set up the version control and oversaw the department. (there were three, including me).
Since I already had LFS (large file storage), we decided to use Github for our version control. My other team members did a rough layout of the level, while I went through and refined + added in the explosion.
I found this really neat free landscape pack which only worked with older versions (4.10 - 4.27) of Unreal. Since simply converting didn't work, I downloaded UE 4.27 and exported the assets from there so I could re-import to our version (5.3).
This pack also came with billboard trees, which was great since our project was super big and performance heavy.
Once I imported the backgrounds, I polished off the overall scene. This included repainting the landscape material to repaint the hill, replacing the water material, adding the volumetric clouds, working exponential height fog to occlude the town slightly, foliage painting, and fiddling with the lighting / post process vol.
I also animated the post-process volume within the sequence to make the explosion more believable. For this, I added more bloom, exposure, and fiddled with the temp.
I really enjoyed using the VP wall - being in a film environment as a game major was super interesting.
