Shock and Ork: How M2 brought a Warhammer: Kill Team battle to life

“The Warhammer 40,000 worlds are so richly detailed. Games Workshop even published books and artwork, as well as extensive rulebooks on the mechanics that tie the story together,” Stanfeld continues. “On one hand, that was a blessing: It meant we had an abundance of documentation and art to build on. On the other hand, however, it puts extra pressure on us to make sure everything we created fits into the universe so many people have imagined.”

To add to the pressure, a global GPU shortage kicked in just as the team began working on the cinematic, which meant that scaling up their render farm would be next to impossible. “We knew we had to find an alternative solution,” reveals Chris Bardoux, CG Supervisor at M2. “For a long time, we’d been impressed by Unreal Engine’s real-time rendering capabilities, and early tests convinced us that it was the right tool for this job. It far exceeded our expectations when it came to both speed and quality of the final renders.”
 

From tabletop to screen

The first step was to use Maya to create all the props, environments, and character animations required for the cinematic’s epic battle scenes. Since all the characters had a tiny plastic miniature counterpart, M2’s art team worked closely with Games Workshop to ensure the Orks and Krieg soldiers resemble the figurines from the Kill Team box set.

By the time M2 delivered the cinematic, 23 out of 28 scenes were rendered directly from Unreal Engine. Houdini was then used to create the more challenging cinematic’s effects, including flamethrower weapons and explosions, before being composited onto the Unreal Engine plates then graded in DaVinci Resolve to complete.

“Using Unreal Engine was out of our comfort zone as we’d never used it before,” says Bardoux. “Having that direct feedback of what the movie was going to look like in the viewport, however, turned out to be priceless. Our render times were reduced to close to nothing, which meant we could quickly iterate versions and spend more time improving the quality of the look. After this experience, we’ll be including Unreal Engine at all stages of our production, and are excited to sink our teeth into Unreal Engine 5. They say you must choose two between fast, good and efficient, but with the help of Unreal Engine, we’re able to offer our clients all three.”