The Orville - Season 3, Episode 8

Realtime VFX - FuseFX 2021-22

As one of FuseFX’s first shows doing full CG in Realtime within Unreal Engine, we had the unique opportunity to develop a pipeline for realtime VFX from the ground up. Working with the various departments, Jordan took into account the needs of each team involved (layout, FX, animation, comp, pipeline) and built a workflow to meet everything required, while maintaining the highest quality content possible and leveraging the efficiency of working in Unreal Engine. Working with rigger Dave Thomlison, we developed scripts to export the cameras and animations out of maya and into the engine. Jordan recorded videos and training sessions to educate the Vancouver based team on best practices, file structures, and workflows for building the 100+ shots and sequences inside Unreal.

Since many of the sequences were full hero CG shots, we wanted to give the compositing team as much material as possible to work with, to help elevate the final product even higher. To do this, Jordan developed a specialized render pass system that would itterate through a given shot, turning on and off lights, ships, and elements as needed, to mimic the outputs of a traditional mulitpass offline renderer. Although this added additional render time to many shots, it was still significally faster than traditional renderers like Redshift or Vray, whie delivering a similar quality of content.

By working on many shots himself, Jordan was able to indentify roadbumps for artists and develop solutions for them in a quick itteration and turnaround process. This helped to pave the way for the other non-realtime artists to use Unreal Engine with the least amount of friction as possible. He also built many utilities and tools such as an Atutomatic Turntable system, Lighting Rig blueprints/templates, the Moclan and Union Fighter blueprints )with artist friendly bells and whistles), and a custom camera system to allow for live keying of plates over the CG scene.

Credits:

Rav Brar - Realtime Supervisor
Frank Belina - CG Superviser
Jamie Barty - Comp Supervisor
Aaron Daly - Virtual Production Technical Director
Jordan Ariel - Lead Unreal Engine Artist
Brendon Morfitt - Look Dev Artist
Corey Bastiaans - Lighting Artist
Teh Yeh - Lighting Artist
Greg Malkin - Artist
Ben Mackey - Systems Engineer
Julian Sarmiento - Global Director, Virtual Production