Unreal Engine Previsualization

This page details my own journey with previsualization in Unreal Engine 5, and all the incredible things I've made it do over the past year!

First Design Visualization - The Moors

My first ever solo design role at my university was as the lighting designer for The Moors by Jen Silverman, and I knew from the beginning that I wanted to incorporate Unreal Engine into my workflow. I had been tinkering around in the software for a little over a year at that point, very off and on as I found the time; and at this point I had become familiar enough with its capabilities that I felt confident it would be an asset rather than a hinderance to my design. It being my first design also meant there were plenty of unanswered questions to be explored, and I felt this would be the perfect tool to help me walk into tech with confidence in my plan. By photoshopping components of the scenic designer's paint elevations into textures applied to the set in Vectorworks, then exporting that model as a datasmith file, I was able to bring the set fully realized into unreal engine. Then, after bringing in some source4 blueprints I had previously created with IES profiles and DMX control built in, as well as mannequines from the MetaHumans plugin, I had everything I needed to start visualizing. This setup allowed be to test out angles and potential positions for systems, gobos and color compositions, and generate full concept renderings for key moments in the show to present to my director. I believe my incorporation of the software into this design was an incredible success, as my director responded really well to the renderings and was able to give more concise feedback than a regular painted rendering would have allowed for, and its closer approximation to real life meant that many of the systems and looks translated really well to the real rig. This experience cemented Unreal as a permanent staple in my workflow, especially since I knew I had only scratched the surface of it.

Stress Testing - Resurrections

This experimental project was created as an exploration into large scale rigs and lighting to music within Unreal Engine. I was heavily inspired by Moment Factory's DMX Previs sample project, and wanted to see if I could do something similar myself. This project had a lot of first times for me, as it was where I learned how to create custom multiparameter fixtures, how to build spaces from scratch within Unreal, how to work with moving head fixtures, and how to record, render and play back sequences with DMX. I started with a Vectorworks file, as I wanted to have a single source of truth for the rig that could export both into unreal and EOS. After making a dead simple space and a rig to inhabit it, I exported the Datasmith with an MVR attached into unreal, where I linked each fixture type to its corresponding blueprint, including a few I made myself which were able to change their position in space based on DMX signals. I then programmed a small show to music in Eos, then loaded the show onto an ETC Apex 5 to play it back to my computer to record. I stored that show as a sequence along with the sound file, then rendered it as an MP4 to be played back whenever. As I said before, this project was more an experiment and a place to try out several things for the first time, so I don't think the final product has much artistic merit, but that was never really the goal. My goal was to learn, and I learned so much from this.

Applications in Projections - Fausto

This project is one of my favorites. Over the summer of 26, I was hired to be the projections designer for an Opera titled Fausto with Opera Neo in California. This was my first time being a projections designer, and though I had done a few shows with this company before as the assistant projections designer, there was still a lot to learn before I got into space. I wanted to use Unreal as a previs solution, since I had had so much success with it in the past, but to my knowledge Unreal doesn't have any built in functionality to support projectors, at least not in this use case. Undeterred, after some research I discovered a workflow that allowed me to see my projections in the space. I created a blueprint out of rect lights that had aspect ratios matching the projectors I was using, as well as a light function attached to them. This light function referenced a texture that itself referenced an NDI stream, which transmitted a live view of my AfterEffects canvas. This meant that I could draw things in Photoshop or Aftereffects, and have those visuals be live updated into the texture that the light in the space was using, emulating a real projector. While a rough approximation in many ways, this succeeded in its goal of conveying artistic ideas to the director and allowing me to play around with the space and get an idea of what might and might not work on the set.

Sequencing and Animating - Il Turco

This was my second projections gig of the season with Opera Neo, and I had a far different task in mind for Unreal this time around. This show utilized a lot of stock assets as its backdrops, so there was little need for previs or content generation in that regard, with one exception. This opera was a comedy, and near the end of the show one of the singers is packed up in a rocket ship and sent off to the moon. I was given the task of making that sequence, and at first I had no idea where to even begin. There was no stock footage I could find that even approximated what we needed, let alone encapsulated a full trip from the earth to the moon. Either I had to get real creative with some editing, or I had to animate the video from scratch. Neither option seemed terribly realistic in the time frame, until I realized something. Nasa has a huge portfolio of 3d assets and textures available for public use, and unreal has many different approaches to building up environments from scratch. I had already gotten a little experience rendering videos out of Unreal with the Resurrections project, and I thought it was just crazy enough to work. I pulled assets for a launch tower and a moon texture, dropped them into a level with a generic HDRI panoramic texture, then keyframed the movement of a camera in the space. After some finishing touches were added in with Aftereffects, I had a finished video that actually worked! I was really proud of this solution, and it was a really fun and novel way for me to use the software.

Texturing and People -
Ruined

We are now at the present day with my current school project, Ruined. This is a play by Lynn Nottage for which I am the lighting designer, and I wanted to take another swing at the workflow I implemented in Moors. This time around, however, I wanted to make a much more polished product, as my last show left a lot to be desired. I hadn't yet learned much about Metahumans, and I wanted to make something a little more natural and accurate than the stiff hospital gowned humans I used for Moors. I also had a much more complex set this time around and only some full stage concept renderings for paint treatment, which meant just scraping textures off paint elevations wasn't an option. To paint the set, I took snippets of the full stage rendering and used them as reference to draw up my own full scale photoshop textures accompanied by some simple height maps, which I then dropped into unreal and converted to materials. Then, after learning how to rig and manipulate metahumans, I was able to create a space that I think requires a lot less suspension of disbelief when presenting to other design teams, which I was quite happy with.

Future Projects

I am far from done with Unreal, and I have many more exciting projects in the works. Next up, I'm exploring creating a more immersive art exhibit style space, combining what I've learned with texturing, projections and lighting all into one project on a scale larger than anything I've done before. Stay tuned, I cannot wait to show you!

Alexander Marshall