In 2019, Quixel`s masterpiece Rebirth showed people the possibility of using a game engine to achieve movie graphic quality.

Along the road by Quixel, I`d like to know how far I can achieve on my own.

A photo I saw accidentally on the internet gave me inspiration, so here it is: After the mountain Rain.

A secluded path, the steps were washed by drizzle, when the breeze blew the leaves, the sunlight turned away the mist... After the rain in the empty mountains, it is the surface of the story, which defined the time and place; by Wang Wei’s poem, I hope you can see the forest after the rain and feel the freshness and tranquility in the mountains.

Actually, the inside of this story is Li Bai's poem: Endless Missing:

Endless Missing, The person who I`m missing is in Chang'an City

In the autumn night,

Insects chirping by the well,

The frost soaked the bamboo mat, it`s so cold

In the past, my eyes were shiny,

Now they are springs with tears

...

In this endless missing,

yellow leaves are falling, and white dews are wetting moss

This long last mind passes through times, across boundaries. A touch of sadness permeated the clouds and mist in the mountains. When the raindrops fell on the mossy path, what I want to express, is a kind of miss.

I used to make some similar pictures in the traditional offline rendering pipeline, which is a far memory. At that time, each frame had to be rendered for several hours, and a sequence had to be rendered all night by a renderfarm. After the rendering process, it took another few hours of post-production to get a final shot. As far as I am concerned, this kind of waiting is anxiety, because a small mistake will force me to redo it again, I have suffered a lot.

Thanks to technological improvement, with Unreal, render a 4K shot, 600 frames only take 2 minutes. In Kungfu we say: Speed Prevails. This rendering speed means that, at the scene building stage, I can start to render many "final" shots, then directly combine them into my “final” video. Meanwhile, The combination of DaVinci and LUT allows the color grading process to be directly moved to the scene creating stage, which truly realizes what you see is what you get, and the rendering is the final shot.

Time flies, enjoy.

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2019年，Quixel的大作Rebirth向人们展示了一种可能性——使用游戏引擎达到电影级画质。