VERB HYDRATE

A cosmetics ad shot on the LED volume, set at a music festival. We built an exterior festival environment in Unreal Engine at three times of the day, plus a virtual crowd to fill the area behind the on-set extras. The whole project was built in a couple of weeks over the holidays.

THE ENVIRONMENTS

We first set up the general environment quickly, then moved on to the crowd and its optimization, because the plan was to capture 48 fps slow motion in camera on the LED volume. The look started as a Coachella and Indio Valley festival and moved toward SummerStage in Central Park.

LOOKDEV AND PREVIS

We began with an initial greybox, then developed skybox lookdev for the Coachella and Central Park looks at dusk and in daylight, plus an early lighting previs at sunset. Rapid prototyping let us run quick previs reviews with the client.

The director planned to shoot at T1.4 with shallow focus. To keep realtime playback manageable at crowd density, the first two to three rows are medium-quality skeletal mesh characters, which give full 3D lighting near the talent. Everything behind them is 2D sprites, animated from flipbooks baked from the same crowd models. We used PCG for the crowd and the forest. One parent Blueprint class drives both the 3D and 2D characters, and on construction it randomizes clothing, colors and animations.

For the dusk scene, the client wanted the stage lights to spill over the crowd. We built a Blueprint controller that animates color shifts in Sequencer. It finds the tagged virtual spotlights and nDisplay light cards, so the crowd lighting stays in sync with the LED ceiling panel lighting the talent. On shoot day we added DMX output to drive several RGB practical lights around the talent, which blended the virtual and practical light. These tools let us adjust color and timing in realtime with the client during the shoot.