alex schiller

My first journey into working with Unreal Engine 5 for running brand Near Earth.
(more info below)

This year I decided it was time for a new challenge.
I had worked with After Effects for the last 20 years and was always intrigued by 3D. Yet I felt intimidated by the available tools. I tried Maya, Cinema 4D, Blender etc... it felt overly complicated and too pricey to just "play around". Having previously worked with Element 3D in After Effects, I had some super basic knowledge of 3D but it always felt very limiting.

Then I stumbled upon an Unreal Engine 5 tutorial on Youtube and went down the rabbit hole. For two weeks straight I did nothing but watch tutorials and read documentation before I even touched the software. I spent 4 weeks learning Unreal and practicing, giving myself daily tasks. This piece for Near Earth was my "training project" and it felt nice to work on something that I knew I would want to share but had no pressure on completing it.

UE5 is eye opening and exciting. And I feel this is just the very tip of the iceberg. This piece was done on a 2017 iMac 5k with i7 processor and 64GB of RAM. So no Nvidia card and no raytracing. Meaning a more powerful machine will open up even more possibilities. Might be time to switch back to PC. But it is cool to see that a somewhat outdated but halfway powerful iMac is enough to start learning and get some nice results.

The world was built of assets from the Quixel Megascans library. The character is a custom Metahuman (latest version June 2022). All movement is done with custom keyframe animation. No presets used. Initially I planned on creating a closeup shot of his face with some nice facial expressions. But for some reason he was missing his eyebrows and eyelashes and hours of troubleshooting only resulted in the realisation that I need a PC with an Nvidia card to get rid of these annoying little problems.

Edited, graded and sound-designed in Premiere
Motion graphics in After Effects
Music by the one and only Jóhann Jóhannsson from the Arrival soundtrack.