The Roller | Unreal project 2021

This is my personal project for:
"Unreal Engine: Virtual Production for Storytellers Spring 2021"

Logline:
This is a story about The Roller, a man who slaves to push gigantic stone spheres to a mysterious destiny.

Synopsis:
The roller has been toiling to deliver gigantic stone balls to his nest. He rolls each ball to his destiny again and again under the scorching sun, the cold night, in the frozen winter, under an overcast sky and into the sunset. He consumes his last energy after bringing the final ball and collapses in the nest. As time goes by, the balls in the nest are submerged by water. His destination is not the end. It is his new beginning.

Inspirations:
Many dung beetles, known as rollers, roll dung into round balls, which are used as a food source or breeding chambers.

Production notes:
This is my first time learning and working with Unreal. The more familiar I became with it’s tools and concepts, the more excited I have become. Doing this project was an excellent way to learn Unreal in five weeks. As a lighting artist, my goal was to explore various lighting scenarios depending on location, weather and time of day.

Since I had a very limited knowledge, I wanted to create a minimal setup for the environment and character so I could focus on lighting. However, I still wanted a good environment design to convey the story. I ended up spending more time setting up the environment. This caused many technical issues which I had to solve or find workarounds for.

By taking advantage of the real-time virtual world, I spent more time exploring creative possibilities than waiting for iteration of rendering and review. Since unreal gave me infinite freedom, I had to be careful and limit myself and focus on visual storytelling.

• All the frames came straight out of Unreal sequencer and I applied minor color correction and retouching in Nuke.
• Decided not to use ray tracing for efficiency on my virtual machine
• Used Quixel library to layout the set. modeled the structure in Houdini.
• Outdoor shots: mainly used the directional light and the skylight with HDR images.
  - One extra rim light was used for the structure.
  - Decided to use overcast HDR images with GI to shape the character and the set even for sunny shots.
  - Tried to explore fog height, sky atmosphere, volume cloud and local fog and particles.
• Indoor shots: mainly used 3 to 5 spot or rectangular lights to shape the shot with heavy local fog.
  - Animated directional sun light After 1’30”. This task was really enjoyable since I could instantly see how it felt as I animated lighting direction to hit the balls in real-time.
  - For the second last shot, I aimed a spotlight behind the character to convey loneliness. Then, I used a caustic light to give the shot life when everything is submerged.
• Placed card reflectors or blocker outside of the camera frame like a real- world cinematographer. I see much more creative freedom in the virtual world where I can overcome many limitations that exist in real life. 
• Used sky image background on a cardboard for the sunset shots after 40 seconds.
  - Actual sun position and god ray do not match the sky background image. I decided to leave it as it is due to the tight schedule.
• The average FPS was around 20-40FPS on the virtual machine during the production. I just got my own RTX 3080 machine and the FPS is 100-120FPS. I found how I can work effortlessly on my PC.
  - I will have to manage assets more efficiently for the next project.
• Had many issues with managing different lighting scenarios with sub levels but learned a lot from them.
  

Used Assets:
Quixel library for environment setup.
Adobe Mixamo for the character animation.
World machine to generate height map for terrain.
Houdini to build the artificial structure

Music:
Produced by Kijun Lee
Improvisation: Piano by Kijun Lee, Violin by Saeromi Yoon

Reference images:

Thanks to Epic Games and ArtStation
Deepak Chetty, Javier Perez, Karen Stanley

Thanks to Quixel and megascan for providing all the building blocks

Special Thanks to Hyungzee Choi, Yeonho Jang
And Blue Sky Studios & BSS Friends