Virtual Production Visualization Guide | Unreal Engine

Learn about the new Virtual Production Visualization Guide in this video with Epic and Magnopus.
Heard about virtual production but not sure where to start? Over the next few months, we’ll be publishing a serialized step-by-step guide that will explain how to use virtual production workflows for visualization—the process of creating computer-generated imagery to help plan and preview various aspects of a production, which includes previs, pitchvis, techvis, stuntvis, and postvis.

You can check it out here: https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/paths/XRe/unreal-engine-virtual-production-visualization-guide

By the end, you’ll know how to set up and run a visualization shoot in Unreal Engine. Our goal is to break down the technical barriers for people who want to get into this innovative way of exploring creative ideas in the initial stages of filmmaking.

Watch this video to hear from members of the Epic team and Magnopus, one of our partners on the project, about what the guide is all about and how it can help your team.

#unrealengine #VirtualProduction #Visualization

[MUSIC PLAYING] SHAUN COMLY: In this visualization guide, we're setting out to tell somebody exactly how to do this sort of virtual production using Unreal Engine. Visualization and virtual production is where we take performance capture and virtual camera and we string that together to make a storyboard.

KATHERINE HARRIS MOJICA: It's where the director, or the DP, working with a team and the art department explore their ideas. If that's the shot that they really wanted or if it's even possible to do the shot that they really wanted.

SHAUN COMLY: So the challenge of visualization when it comes to virtual production is that you take a sophisticated game engine, like Unreal Engine, you throw in multiple pieces of software, hardware, timecode, and then you throw in film directors and try to make them all play nice together.

KATHERINE HARRIS MOJICA: Visualization is difficult because there's no one way. And it's even more difficult because no one way is ever written down.

SHAUN COMLY: And that's when we started to go, OK, we need to start to pull all this stuff together to figure out how to get from A to B. So, at Epic we are lucky enough to be in contact with a bunch of studios who are leading the field in virtual production.
Once we told them what we were trying to do here, absolutely every single one of them was more than happy to talk to us at length about their processes, certain rules that they have, things that work for them, things that haven't worked for them, and their feedback is going to make Unreal Engine better and easier to use.

KATHERINE HARRIS MOJICA: Having a lot of experience on set throughout the years using Unreal, we've really dug into the engine, including working with Epic on a lot of our tools and how we use them with directors.

LILY PITTS: Creating a process that's flexible, allowing for adaptability by a director is really, really important and hard to do. Figuring out exactly where things go wrong and how to fix them, even harder.

SHAUN COMLY: We went halfway down the path and then realized that we had to way back up and figure out what kind of slate we want to use, what our naming conventions are going to be for our sequences, how we're going to tape record things, how we're going to use sub scenes, how we're not going to use sub scenes.

And what we're setting out to do here is we want to go through and make all of these mistakes and tell you exactly what happened and what we should have done, and then go back and redo them. If we've done it right, somebody should be able to start from the beginning and go all the way through to the end of the guide and be able to start their own small visualization studio.

KATHERINE HARRIS MOJICA: I wish they had done this years ago.
[LAUGHS] It would have saved me so much time, and energy, and tears.

SHAUN COMLY: We're refraining from calling this the best practice guide. This is more of a, if you don't have to do it, this is a great place to start, and then you figure out what works best for you and your studio. But this is supposed to be a foundational piece. This guide is being written for one person sitting in their room that wants to get into this or a large studio that wants to build up their own team. We're listing different hardware at different price points, software, and the same thing with body capture solutions, face capture solutions, what buttons to push to democratize this type of virtual production.

KATHERINE HARRIS MOJICA: One thing I love about this whole process is that it allows for any creator to get started.

LILY PITTS: Being able to look at a single source of information and be like, yes, finally, a place for people to approach Unreal Engine with confidence, knowing that throughout the whole process, they have a place to refer to.

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#Unreal Engine #Virtual Production #Visualization #Previsualization #Previs #Magnopus #Filmmaking