UE5 lays the smackdown on long rendering times for WWE’s Clash in Paris
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is famed for putting on dazzling live shows that incorporate both special and visual effects, dramatic lighting, and theatrical entrances.
The company hosts hundreds of live events annually, from weekly shows like Raw and SmackDown to major annual Premium Live Events like WrestleMania and Royal Rumble.
“We have three live shows every single week of the year,” says Perry Harovas, Lead Engineer, Graphics & VFX at WWE TV Production. “We have at least 36 Premium Live Events every single year. Every single one of those has a different look, a different feel.”
The company hosts hundreds of live events annually, from weekly shows like Raw and SmackDown to major annual Premium Live Events like WrestleMania and Royal Rumble.
“We have three live shows every single week of the year,” says Perry Harovas, Lead Engineer, Graphics & VFX at WWE TV Production. “We have at least 36 Premium Live Events every single year. Every single one of those has a different look, a different feel.”
For Harovas, this volume and diversity of aesthetics presents a challenge. He is part of the team tasked with creating the motion graphics that will be shown on the big screen at the live event and on the TV broadcast streamed to fans watching around the world.
That can mean delivering somewhere in the region of 400 deliverables each time—and with a month to do it, if they’re lucky. “It could be down to two weeks, or even a week, it really depends on the show,” explains Cilian Tung, 3D Art Director at WWE TV Production.
That can mean delivering somewhere in the region of 400 deliverables each time—and with a month to do it, if they’re lucky. “It could be down to two weeks, or even a week, it really depends on the show,” explains Cilian Tung, 3D Art Director at WWE TV Production.
A Van Gogh look and not much time to achieve it
For this summer’s Clash in Paris wrestling extravaganza, the team was asked to develop motion graphics with a Van Gogh-style painterly look.
With hundreds of deliverables required and the clock ticking, the team decided to do something different this time around. For the first time ever, they brought Unreal Engine into the pipeline.
“We chose Unreal Engine for a very specific reason,” says Harovas. “Rendering is at the end of the process—and it is the hardest, longest part. It's also prone to so many changes at the end that we then have to figure out. So Unreal Engine was an obvious solution.”
The only person on the team trained to use Unreal Engine at that point was Visual Effects Supervisor Cameron Whitehouse. He’d be responsible for the Herculean task of single-handedly rendering out over 400 deliverables in two weeks.
“In the past, it would not be unusual for us to work really late nights having to babysit a farm and re-render bad frames,” says Whitehouse. “With Unreal, we can do a 10K render in an hour when it would take days before.”
It was clear that Unreal Engine’s ability to generate final-pixel frames in a fraction of the time of traditional tools was going to dramatically speed up the process of rendering out the graphics for the show. But would the team be able to achieve the very specific Van Gogh-style look in the engine?
This question occupied their minds for much of the pre-production phase for Clash in Paris. The answer lay in leveraging Unreal Engine’s post-processing capabilities.
“Unreal Engine’s ability to use the post-process volume, to affect the entire world in three dimensions—not just (as what you would think of post-process is) in a 2D way—but in a 3D way, was invaluable in getting this look that we wanted, which is literally brush strokes in 3D on every single object,” says Harovas.
By combining effects like Kuwahara filtering for brushstroke-like effects, cel-shading for flat colors, custom normal maps for distortion, and manual light implementation to control how textures respond to light, it’s possible to achieve a painterly style in UE.
The team were able to make that discovery by quickly experimenting and iterating in the engine. Because everything is rendered in real time, you can have an idea, test it out, make some tweaks—and see the results instantly.
That’s a world away from doing the same process in an offline rendering tool, where you’d have to wait every single time you wanted to render new changes.
Fast prototyping and creative exploration
For the team at WWE TV Production, the ability to explore different creative options in UE has given them the confidence to back ideas that they may have previously shied away from.
“Every pitch process, we are writing a check that our asses have to cash,” explains Whitehouse. “Over the many years I’ve been here, we have always steered away from pitches that would be too challenging and would create render pipeline bottlenecking.
“Unreal gives us the ability to rapidly prototype ideas, to explore a set that we can create, to work on lighting, and art direct ourselves while we’re building—so that when we walk into the next pitch, we have a more fleshed out idea.”
The process of prototyping is also significantly faster thanks to the ease with which the team can grab high-quality assets from Fab to build out their scenes.
“Our modeller put out four different models for this Unreal set: the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the archway, and the Louvre,” says Tung. “But the overall city, we just found that from the Fab library—we dropped it in and it just worked.”
Integrating Unreal Engine into their graphics pipeline for broadcast and live events has been little short of revolutionary for the team at WWE TV Production.
“We essentially took our entire render farm—which is about 60 machines that are all rendering and often working 24/7—down to one person using Unreal Engine on one machine, getting over 400 deliverables out just on that one machine,” says Harovas. “I mean it's a huge contrast between what we did before and what we can do now.”
That success means the team plans to upskill more artists on Unreal Engine, with future projects set to require less time on rendering and more time on fun creative exploration—and resulting in one relieved VFX supervisor.
“We're going to start training every artist in the department to get familiar with Unreal,” says Tung, “so we don't have to heavily rely on Cameron!”
That success means the team plans to upskill more artists on Unreal Engine, with future projects set to require less time on rendering and more time on fun creative exploration—and resulting in one relieved VFX supervisor.
“We're going to start training every artist in the department to get familiar with Unreal,” says Tung, “so we don't have to heavily rely on Cameron!”