"Zombie Army: Legion of the Dead" Short Film

This was the first project that I worked with the Rebellion VFX team, it was also my first experience with Unreal 4 in production. I worked has 3D Generalist Lead with set dressing and scatter (Maya and Houdini); lookdev and texture refinement (Substance and Unreal); lookdev and procedural textures (Unreal), light (Unreal) and also a bit on the pipeline (Mel / Python).

We started this project at 2019, using the UE 4.22 with the goal to create the real time pipeline for the studio and also trying to create a product close has possible from a offline render. We used the assets from the Zombie Army 4, provided by the game division of Rebellion, and also we added a new layer of details using the Megascan library and a lot of new scatter made in Houdini.

At the time, without raytracing, the biggest challenge was to create a environment that looked has much realistic has possible. Unreal is a amazing tool, but specially at that time, it was not ready for a vfx workflow. It was like a treasure hunt for the hidden settings to make the final image a bit more realistic. Another challenge was to render the shots in a easy way for dailies and for comp. To help with the render workflow I end up creating a simple bath render tool to speed up our work.

Besides working on the environment and pipeline, I also work on the real time lookdev of the hero characters. The shader of them was based on the Mike unreal project, which was very useful specially for the eyes and the skin. I end up creating a few more textures to drive the SSS and the micro skin details.

This was a very challenging project, but thanks to the whole talent team of Rebellion VFX the final result was pretty impressive!!