Visual effects studio Halon Entertainment, using the Unreal engine at the heart of its pipeline, has been able to expand and diversify its activities in a wide variety of areas. Now all the artists in the studio work with Unreal Engine and use real-time workflows, whether they're working on cinematic cutscenes for games, movies, or commercials.
The founder of the company, Daniel Gregoire, noted that the company uses almost all the features of the real-time game engine in games, movies, and so on. Initially, Halon Entertainment, using the Unreal engine, attracted external specialists, but as the complexity of tasks and the growth of teams grew, this tool became the basis of their work.
"Recently we have , which was a very exciting project. We used the approach when everything in the video was done using real-time technologies. This allowed us to compress the time frame and give additional creative freedom to the director, who can create extremely complex camera passes and scenes, allowing changes to be made right during playback, ”said Gregoire.
Using the Unreal Engine, the studio was able to quickly and efficiently render ideas and scenes (for example, for the movie Ad Astra). “A lot of the work we did in Maya is now done in Unreal. Lighting, effects, rendering we can do through Unreal. Now we can even do ray tracing in Unreal,” said Ryan McCoy from the studio.
Companies often had to work extremely quickly. For example, there was very little time to work on the third act of Aquaman: traditional tools simply would not have coped with the task. The scene includes thousands of different ships, hundreds of thousands of marine life, which are refracted in the water; all this is complemented by different levels of transparency, rays of light and motion blur: and the whole scene was calculated in real time. At the same time, the quality was of paramount importance: the scene should not stand out from the general video sequence of the film.
Daniel Gregoire noted that thanks to the introduction of Unreal Engine, the company has grown rapidly: ten years ago, the team consisted of 30-40 people, and now Halon Entertainment has more than 100 employees.
Source: 3dnews.ru