Images courtesy of Prime Video
Blur Studio is well-known in the animation industry for their movie-quality game cinematics, and more recently, the Netflix anthology series Love, Death + Robots. The studio was founded in 1995 with the idea of “art before commerce,” an approach that has served them well as they’ve moved from strength to strength.
Their most recent series, Secret Level on Amazon Prime, explores the worlds of iconic video games like Warhammer and Pac-Man. Each 15-minute episode is like a glimpse into a previously unseen level of that game, a cutscene as good as any movie, crafted with a level of storytelling, dialogue, and visual quality that engages viewers even if they’ve never played the game.
As part of the Secret Level series, Blur wanted to do an episode around Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament game. Epic agreed, but on one condition: the entire episode had to be created with an Unreal Engine animation pipeline.
Tim Miller, CEO of Blur, was happy to hear this news. “We'd been waiting for a reason to do it,” he says.
Their most recent series, Secret Level on Amazon Prime, explores the worlds of iconic video games like Warhammer and Pac-Man. Each 15-minute episode is like a glimpse into a previously unseen level of that game, a cutscene as good as any movie, crafted with a level of storytelling, dialogue, and visual quality that engages viewers even if they’ve never played the game.
As part of the Secret Level series, Blur wanted to do an episode around Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament game. Epic agreed, but on one condition: the entire episode had to be created with an Unreal Engine animation pipeline.
Tim Miller, CEO of Blur, was happy to hear this news. “We'd been waiting for a reason to do it,” he says.
Creating the ‘Unreal Tournament’ episode meant Blur would need to build a new pipeline from the ground up, learning the capabilities of Unreal Engine while simultaneously creating a high-end, production-ready episode for broadcast.
The Director of the ‘Unreal Tournament’ episode, Franck Balson, was also up for the challenge. “I’ve wanted to push that technology forward in the studio for a long time,” he says, “so I was like, ‘Game on! Let's do it.’'"
“Learning the engine, we had to go back to the basics,” says CG Supervisor Jean-Baptiste Cambier. “The craft comes from your experience. Our best artists in traditional workflows became our best artists in Unreal Engine.”
The Director of the ‘Unreal Tournament’ episode, Franck Balson, was also up for the challenge. “I’ve wanted to push that technology forward in the studio for a long time,” he says, “so I was like, ‘Game on! Let's do it.’'"
Ramping up for ‘Unreal Tournament’
Of the 50-or-so Blur artists that worked on the project, only a handful were already well-versed in Unreal Engine. The rest ramped up quickly, with the team sharing knowledge through quick-tip tutorials that helped them transfer their skills from familiar tools like Maya, 3ds Max, and V-Ray to an Unreal Engine workflow.“Learning the engine, we had to go back to the basics,” says CG Supervisor Jean-Baptiste Cambier. “The craft comes from your experience. Our best artists in traditional workflows became our best artists in Unreal Engine.”
Images courtesy of Prime Video
The team got their feet wet with a short proof of concept. As they developed the new pipeline, they realized they could produce a lot of shots in a short amount of time—up to 70 shots in one week. “That is just not something we could do with a pre-rendered pipeline,” says Balson. “That's really thanks to Unreal Engine that we were able to do that.”
The biggest reward, Balson says, was that nobody could tell that the episode was done in engine. “We did the layout, the animation, the rendering, and the lighting in the engine,” he says. “So what you see in the end, everything comes out of the engine.”
The biggest reward, Balson says, was that nobody could tell that the episode was done in engine. “We did the layout, the animation, the rendering, and the lighting in the engine,” he says. “So what you see in the end, everything comes out of the engine.”
MetaHumans for the win
The ‘Unreal Tournament’ episode of Secret Level features dozens of characters, both humans and “monsters,” as the team calls them. These highly detailed characters were created by first modeling them in Maya, then using the Mesh to MetaHuman workflow to create MetaHumans from them. They also added wrinkle detail in ZBrush, then exported maps to further enhance the characters’ unique faces.Images courtesy of Prime Video
As for rigging, the team wanted more controls than MetaHumans offered out of the box. They were able to port in a custom facial rig from Maya and merge it with the standard MetaHuman rig, giving them the ability to use both the custom and MetaHuman rig controls inside Unreal Engine. This process worked even for monster characters with nonhuman facial features such as sunken eyes and protruding jaws and teeth.
Animating the characters in Unreal Engine gave the team the advantage of instant feedback and fast iteration on animated scenes, particularly because the real-time playback was so close to the finished version. “You get the reflections in the eyes and you get the specular on the skin, things that we usually don't get in a package like Maya where it's just grayscale,” Balson says. “It allowed us to go through a lot of the facial really quickly compared to our traditional pipeline.”
Another advantage of MetaHumans is their shared rig setup, which makes it easy to swap one character’s head for another even after animation is well underway. This feature was a great help to the team during troubleshooting. “We were lighting a specific character and he did not look quite right, and we were like, ‘Okay, so what is wrong?’” explains Cambier. “Why not swap it in in the shot to see how that character looks, and maybe this is going to help us understand why.”
Animating the characters in Unreal Engine gave the team the advantage of instant feedback and fast iteration on animated scenes, particularly because the real-time playback was so close to the finished version. “You get the reflections in the eyes and you get the specular on the skin, things that we usually don't get in a package like Maya where it's just grayscale,” Balson says. “It allowed us to go through a lot of the facial really quickly compared to our traditional pipeline.”
Another advantage of MetaHumans is their shared rig setup, which makes it easy to swap one character’s head for another even after animation is well underway. This feature was a great help to the team during troubleshooting. “We were lighting a specific character and he did not look quite right, and we were like, ‘Okay, so what is wrong?’” explains Cambier. “Why not swap it in in the shot to see how that character looks, and maybe this is going to help us understand why.”
Images courtesy of Prime Video
The ease of swapping out characters’ heads and bodies also made it possible for Balson, as Director, to try out different directions for the story without burdening the team’s workload. “On a traditional pipeline, when you make a last-minute decision, it's a whole endeavor. You have to go back to animation, to layout,” says Cambier. “But now if you need to swap a character with our rigging setup, you can swap your characters on the fly, and suddenly you get your new characters featured in the shot within your latest lighting. It's a game changer.”
The ‘Unreal Tournament’ episode wasn’t the only one in the Secret Level series to use MetaHumans. The ‘Crossfire: Good Conflict’ episode, crafted by Polish studio Platige Image, credits Epic’s MetaHuman Animator with giving them the ability to create highly realistic and emotionally nuanced performances for their characters.
The ‘Unreal Tournament’ episode wasn’t the only one in the Secret Level series to use MetaHumans. The ‘Crossfire: Good Conflict’ episode, crafted by Polish studio Platige Image, credits Epic’s MetaHuman Animator with giving them the ability to create highly realistic and emotionally nuanced performances for their characters.
Real-time visual effects
The team at Blur was inspired to make tools and rigs for their animators that would provide real-time feedback on special effects, making animation more efficient and cutting down on post-production. One such effect was for weapons—when an animator pointed a gun, they would see all the sparks and smoke right there in Unreal Engine, in real time.Images courtesy of Prime Video
For the stadium crowd featured in the ‘Unreal Tournament’ episode, the team needed to find a way to give life to 300,000 spectators. They had a crowd and it was moving, but they felt something was missing. “We were looking at the shots like, it's okay, it's cool, but we needed something more,” says Cambier.
In looking at reference images of large concert crowds, they noticed a large number of people were filming the event with cell phones, which added pops of moving light to the dark expanse of the audience. But the usual method of adding this touch to a 3D scene—attaching prop phones to animated crowd members’ hands—would be unwieldy, so they had another idea: why not add self-illumination to spectators’ hands to simulate them holding a lit-up device from the future?
Because the team was working in Unreal Engine, they were able to quickly try it out, and confirm it as a good solution. “That just worked,” says Cambier. “It's a nice trick.”
In looking at reference images of large concert crowds, they noticed a large number of people were filming the event with cell phones, which added pops of moving light to the dark expanse of the audience. But the usual method of adding this touch to a 3D scene—attaching prop phones to animated crowd members’ hands—would be unwieldy, so they had another idea: why not add self-illumination to spectators’ hands to simulate them holding a lit-up device from the future?
Because the team was working in Unreal Engine, they were able to quickly try it out, and confirm it as a good solution. “That just worked,” says Cambier. “It's a nice trick.”
Images courtesy of Prime Video
Faster iteration
One of the greatest benefits of using Unreal Engine for animation is real-time review, where a director can work directly with lighters and animators to iteratively tweak the scene and make rapid updates.“The fact that you're able to sit with an artist and in real time, sort of dictate or try ideas out, is just a new thing for us,” Balson says, “because usually it's just like multiple rounds. It takes days, and here it just takes minutes.”
Images courtesy of Prime Video
Miller notes that with Unreal Engine, there’s also a direct benefit for artists—the flow between artist and image is unfiltered. “The response time of what you're doing with real-time technology is so different and so much more in the flow of creation, it's a whole new way of making things,” he says.
Cambier confesses there was one serious downside of working with Unreal Engine: now it’s hard for him to go back to a traditional pipeline. “When we started the project, people were telling me, ‘You're going to have trouble coming back to other methods,’” Cambier says. “It turns out they were right. Coming back to traditional workflows proved very difficult. I couldn't shade in real time. I couldn’t light in real time. So anytime I have the chance, I'm going back into the engine.”
Cambier confesses there was one serious downside of working with Unreal Engine: now it’s hard for him to go back to a traditional pipeline. “When we started the project, people were telling me, ‘You're going to have trouble coming back to other methods,’” Cambier says. “It turns out they were right. Coming back to traditional workflows proved very difficult. I couldn't shade in real time. I couldn’t light in real time. So anytime I have the chance, I'm going back into the engine.”
Looking at the future
Although he admits there were bumps in the road to get there, Miller is proud of what the team accomplished with the ‘Unreal Tournament’ episode of Secret Level, and believes that real-time technology is the future. “Unreal Engine makes everything better,” he says. “It makes the production time shorter. It makes the teams tighter. It makes the integration between departments better.”Images courtesy of Prime Video
Perhaps the biggest impact of Blur’s Unreal Engine experience is a changed attitude toward future projects. Blur has had a story in development, Miller says, that involves a large environment populated by thousands of creatures, but they haven’t tackled it yet because it’s too visually dense for their traditional pipeline to handle.
“Unreal Engine opens up a whole, broad array of projects that we couldn't do,” says Miller. “It brings a lot of that within reach. We can do that. The tools are there.
It's a whole new way of working, and I'm super excited about it.”
“Unreal Engine opens up a whole, broad array of projects that we couldn't do,” says Miller. “It brings a lot of that within reach. We can do that. The tools are there.
It's a whole new way of working, and I'm super excited about it.”
How to install Unreal Engine
Download the launcher
Before you can install and run Unreal Editor, you’ll need to download and install the Epic Games launcher.
Install Epic Games launcher
Once downloaded and installed, open the launcher and create or log in to your Epic Games account.
Get support, or restart your Epic Games launcher download in Step 1.
Install Unreal Engine
Once logged in, navigate to the Unreal Engine tab and click the Install button to download the most recent version.
Watch how to install