Mold3D's Unreal Engine short film “Slay” will be released with character sharing

In a featured blog post on the implementation of the project released today, Epic Games' Unreal Engine team announced that the debut of Mold3D Studio's new real-time animated short Slay is made even more interesting with the addition of the Windwalker Echo hero character to the downloadable assets in Unreal Engine 4.27 and Unreal Engine 5 Early Access. The character was introduced in the UE5 reveal video, Lumen in the Land of Nanite (Lumen in the Land of Nanite). Mold3D and Epic will do the full sample project of Slay available for download and exploration later this month.

Mold3D was founded in 2016 by CEO Edward Quintero, a 22-year veteran creative leader, animator, VFX and environmental artist whose resume includes roles at ILM, DreamWorks Animation and successful projects such as The matrix trilogy, Avatar e The Mandalorian. The studio was formed to explore the potential of real-time technology and content creation, as Quintero was collaborating with Epic on Unreal Engine projects such as Paragon e Robo Recall.

SlayQuintero started publishing Slay on Epic after the completion of the UE5 demo.

The proposal was to create a finished piece of final pixel animated content in Unreal Engine.

With Mold3D starting to gain a reputation for environmental art, they were thrilled to illustrate their experience in story development and character design.

With the exception of the Windwalker Echo,  the assets of Slay (including his opponent) were all designed and created by Mold3D.

As the project received the green light just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the studio quickly switched to a remote work environment to create rendered animations in real time - as well as other Mold3D projects - using virtual production techniques. . The motion-capture was created in Las Vegas, with Quintero's team in Burbank directing the actors via Zoom while viewing the results on the characters in real time in the Unreal Engine, making it easy to make sure they had the footage they wanted. After the main movement was captured, the team did a second session with the actor just to capture the face. For this, they used the iOS Live Link Face app.

“While we probably would have done a lot of things the same way we did if there hadn't been the pandemic, luckily we were able to rely on the virtual production aspect of the film to save the day,” Quintero said. "We were able to watch her footage with the recording that came out of the iPhone and also, in the day, we could see the camera looking at her."

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The team had previously modeled assets in Maya and ZBrush, before locking animation in Maya and bringing it to Unreal Engine via FBX, where they also locked cameras in Sequencer, Unreal Engine's built-in multitrack nonlinear editor. Leveraging the engine's ability to render files in real time, they brought the animation every day, starting from a very raw state, even while the models themselves were still in the finalization stage. For the development of the look, the team used many materials and shaders from Unreal Engine, including vertex shaders and decals to not only give a unique effect, but also to maintain real-time performance.

“It was great to see the previs with light and color. You got a taste of what it would be like right away, instead of having to wait a few months to start getting a little more involved. It was invaluable, as it helped us visualize and refine the look along the way, ”Quintero noted. "It combines the tricks, techniques and processes that have been learned over the years I've worked in the visual effects and animation industry, with the benefits of being able to iterate quickly and visualize the results in real time."

Additionally, Mold3D used Unreal Engine's Landscape toolset to create the terrain and Quixel Megascans, which are free for all uses with Unreal Engine, to populate the environment. Effects, such as the glowing sphere, were mostly done in Niagara, Unreal Engine's visual effects system. Lighting played a key role in the look of the project, with the team leveraging Unreal Engine's real-time ray tracing capabilities to produce sophisticated effects. To perfect the characters' close-up lighting, they built cinematic-style lighting fixtures into Unreal Engine, allowing them to create beauty lighting, edge lighting, key lighting, and so on.

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“We had a certain look we were looking for. I think originally, we wanted it to be very stylized, like a manga / anime type thing, but it went more towards trying to make it realistic. And it ended up being a bit hybrid, not super photorealistic, but it has a bit of a stylized shade. Lighting was an important part of this; we worked with different lighters to get the right look, ”Quintero explained. The fast-changing potential of the lighting in real time was one of the things the team appreciated the most: “If it doesn't work for the shot, you can quickly shift the direction of the sun or quickly shift the character's light and feel the your way, instead of having to turn on, render overnight, come back, check your renders and not be happy.

In addition to the obvious benefits of being able to render frames in fractions of a second rather than minutes or hours, Mold3D also appreciated being able to conduct multiple aspects of production at the same time, such as working on appearance development in parallel with animation and able to make decisions in a flexible way, based on the context of the images; not to mention composition, timing, camera and lighting.

“It wouldn't have been possible without the creative collaboration and continued support of the Epic Games team,” Quintero said. “They were there for us every step of the way. Our company has grown by leaps and bounds on this project and we can't wait to see many more interesting productions in Unreal Engine.

Watch Slay on Youtube.

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