Backstory
During this year (2025) I found myself working with Unreal engine on a large video project.
I started the project with my standard and tested workflow but when the demand for faster turn arounds and more finished look was requested I made a quick decision to move the production over to Unreal, this ended up saving the project.
So now under vacation times when everyone else is free. I’ve been spending some time developing a new workflow that is a mix of my standard workflow and a new Unreal workflow.
The goal
The goal with this is to have faster turn arounds, maintain the quality and remove long render time and cost, and a bonus would be if I can get a solid USD workflow going so that whatever software you like to choose don’t matter it all goes into one and same scene mixer where you light and export from.
Presentation
As we stand today, I took a break from banging my head trying to get a water sim to work and used what I already learned so far to make a little product video for Drysorb. This took about a week.
I started to model the character 26 July and was done 05 August and this 34 sec (1020 frames), 30 fps 3840×2160 took me about 1 hour to export (and that is with about 20 min export in AE), the 3D was so clean I needed to add noise in post.
Character animation is a blend/clean-up between Mixamo pre-animations in Cinema 4D
The water is animated in Cinema 4D
The cushion is animated with Cinema 4D Fields
The car is a Volvo S90 from Turbosquid
The character´s texture is done in Substance Painter and the car’s interior is done with a special pbr/procedural material I created in Unreal. Cameras are animated in Unreal and both scenes is lighted in Unreal.
As of right now this project used multiple file formats Alembic, FBX, Cineware and USD it’s functional to a degree for a single worker as me. But I would like to see in the future a use of only USD so that larger teams of people can work in one project and that´s what I working toward.
Fun Fact
I did a fast calculation on Rebus farm and they estimated it to take about 41,67h on my own machine and would cost about 7 262 sek. (and as we all know that’s low, more likely double that)
Workflow chart
This year I´ve worked with my standard workflow, this new one that I´m developing and I´ve also tried working with AI in production. Even though the score here is just personal estimate I really tried to be fair.
