'DEVMASA' 短片丨Technicolor

As part of my role at The Mill (Technicolor), I got this amazing opportunity to work on this short film.

When Epic Games announced this invitational program, a total of six core artists had been gathered to make the film for the course of three months. Two of our team were Animators and the rest of us were Generalists. I was also an acting Team Lead for this team and this was easily one of the favourite teams I worked with. The entire film would never have seen the light of the day if it weren’t for all of our hard work and just pure passion.

We spent the first month on the pre-production stage and the next two on Unreal Engine. The first month was crucial, building out the team chemistry, learning to work collaboratively and even learning Unreal Engine. It was on the final day when we saw the final master edit (which was done on the final delivery date :D), we realized what we had just done.

We gave ourselves a pat on the back and some days later, were given the ’Winners’ title.

You can read about this program on this official Unreal Engine’s Blog Post.

Our Director’s comment on this Blog post. Read article from the ’Times of India’ here.

This Behance post only highlights and covers the work that I put towards this short film and is not a collective project post by our team at Technicolor Creative Studios. This is not an official post on behalf of Technicolor Creative Studios. You can read the official blog post about this project in this link.

In case you are interested about the other aspects of this film and to know more of the work that my teammates did, I have linked their profiles towards the end of this post.

The entire project was done as part of my role at The Mill and I do not own any rights to the following images and videos. All the assets and publications belong to Technicolor Creative Studios and Epic Games.

Village and Beach Modelling & Set Dressing

The main buildings that you see on the first 4 images down below were modelled by me and brought to UE. I also did full dressing work for all these scenes that is the opening sequence of our film. Many more things have been done by my other teammates on further stages and are showcased on the final film.

When we kicked off the project, we started with this Marketplace asset map since our Director liked the layout of it. Later down the line, we extended the landscape, added sea, replaced several majorly visible models, plus did heavy propping work to make the scene setup as authentic and "Indian" as possible.

The below images showcase an early version of set dressing that I worked on. Our Director did not approve of this as this setup failed to show itself as an Indian village. We then worked on replacing all the major buildings from being a wooden shack to concrete ones later on. The first image down below shows Jhinga’s house how it was initially. After this point, we scrapped all these things and decided to make the village as lived-in as possible.

Fishing Boat Lookdev

Original Model -https://skfb.ly/6Sr8A

After acquiring the model, I worked on the lookdev of the boat starting from modifying the model, UV unwrapping, setting up materials, decals and propping of the boat as per the Direction. And after this point, my teammate Harsh worked on other details like the Flag, text paint and several corrections that shows up on the final film.

Flashback Scenes / Underwater Shots Lighting and FX

I worked on the lighting and material setups for all the Flashbackscenes.

The sky setup that you see on the first image down below comes from one of the UDS presets, however I removed all the light contributions from the plugin and went with native light setup and animation for environment and lightning.

All the water surface in our film comes from the Oceanology plugin but we removed the Underwater post-process from that. It was easy for me to just use the native Unreal lighting and we just stuck with that for easy consistency across different scenes. The dust/smoky underwater is just a special volumetric fog material (Check this tweet and reply from Chris Murphy).

It took several trail and errors for finalizing the look along with our Director, and the greatest challenge was to do everything without the Magical Fish and it’s glow in place. It was a week before the deadline, and we just had our first Whale animation imported to Unreal. A workflow problem that we had with Unreal was having two different lookdevs - The lookdev we had in viewport always differed from the one we had in final render. Fog and skylight weren’t spawning correctly during many renders and it took away all my time I had for fixes on later stage.

I personally feel like I could have done a better job in the Fish-net breaking scene and with the Material glow anims on that entire sequence, but time just didn’t wait for us.

The particle FX, school of fishes were all done by teammate, Jegan.

Magical FishLookdev

We acquired a base Fish model from our existing library and with modelling support from the Mr.X team we were able to modify it and rig it as per our needs. They also worked on the texturing lookdev and shared us all these assets - The model with Rig setup, diffuse, Roughness, Displacement and Normal maps.

Then I headed on to Unreal and setup materials for our Fish. This was one of the challenging tasks for me since I had to give myself enough controls over the material parameters for the glow animation at later stage. Below image is just a portion of the material nodes that makes the skin glow animation work. With a simple Gradient and Sine node I was able to make the sweep and breathing glow effect on the Fish’s skin. I followed this tutorial to do all this.

This portion of the material then connects to the main setup which is just a slightly modified Megascans material (since it comes with a LOT of useful control parameters).

All the mesh animations were then done and imported as alembic meshes by our animators while I worked on the material and light actors animations.

Universe inside the EyeAnimated Texture&Lookdev

This is the eye-opening shot of the Fish that you see in the second half of the film.

I created this animated Universe reveal effect inside of After Effects modifying and adding several layers of Trapcode presets + Fractal Noise + Turbulent Displacement + simple masks. And then Iimported these to UE as media textures.

I followed this tutorial to set up the materials and below are the base color and emissive maps that I did. This was done on the final 30 hours of the deadline and perhaps was the most riskiest and pressure-heavy situation for me. Due to this very reason, wedid not get time to work and put an eye-lid for our girl. The eye lid not being present clearly shows up on the next shot and we realize that it looks odd.

The following videos were just some experimental stuff that I did while working on this. We also showcased these things on our update meetings with the other short film studios.

The next two clips show the initial lookdev of the underwater lighting and post process, along with simple particles I did with Cascade. We initially had this idea of doing a reveal shot of the whale in a silhouette lighting that’s caused by the boat’s search lights above. But then we scrapped this idea as we decided to have the scene at a much greater depth where the only source of light was the magical fish itself.

The waves on the water surface is just plane with a panning noise texture. The material is taken from this Marketplace asset.

Below is the render I took when the lookdev of the Oceanology water material and boat lighting was done. This scene uses physics based buoyancy from the Oceanology setup, but then later we turned it off and went for key-framed buoyancy as our animators were just comfortable with that.

At a very early stage, following very similar workflow (Chris Murphy’s tweet and reply) of adding the dust for Underwater shots, I added this animated fog effect. But then, we decided not to do that.

This video down here shows the original base lighting setup without any post process. After this point, we brought down the light intensity to sort of mimic the moonlit water. On top of this I did more color correction, glow, vignette and typical post process on the later stages.

A fun little Moodboard that we had.

MAJOR EXTERNAL ASSETS (UEMarketplace)

Oceanology•Ultra Dynamic Sky (For Sky Materials)•Quixel Megascans•Slums•Medieval Docks

Humpback Whale (Used on Previz)Realistic Forest Pack• Open World Demo Collection• City Park Environment Collection

Fishing Docks & Boat Pack•Fishing Boat•Cinemotion 2Motion Kit

Contest ByEpic Games-Short Film ByTechnicolorCreative Studios-Directed ByNeha Sharma -Produced By Ruchir Joshi

UNREAL ARTISTS

Prabhu Ram (Myself) - Assets, Set Dressing, FX, Underwater Lighting, Post Process

Vigneshwaran - Metahuman Creator, Main Animation, Cinematics

Prasit Das - Main Animation

Prachi Kamalakant Nagwekar - Facial Animation

Harsh Patel - Metahuman Creator, Animation, Assets, Set Dressing

Jegan Devaraj - FX, Technical R&D, Set Dressing

Balamurugan - Lighting, Set Dressing

THE AMAZING MANAGEMENT/SUPERVISING TEAM

Jateen Thakkar

SaranKumar

Rutvij Barot

Chaitra Joshi

R K Chand

Atul Sharma

Sabyasachi Bose

Orlin Machado

THE MR.X TEAM

Kapil Dev Anand & several other artists at Mr.X - For Magical Fish (Modelling/Texturing/Rigging), School Bag (Rig), Fish Net (Model/Rig), Plastic Bag (Rig), Birds Formation (Animation)

THEEPIC GAMES TEAM

Arvind Neelakantan

Shruthi VermaSameer Pitalwalla

Dean Reinhard(UE Technical Support)

THANK YOU

Iam just grateful for the opportunity fromTechnicolorand having what we achieved as a team here.

As goes without saying, I owe this all tomy family.I would many times take a life changing decision in such ease, because I know, my family would always be there to support me in the end.And Ananya!- Thank you, friend! I wouldn’t have been here at all, if not for her inspirations.