'Breathing Underwater' - A Rocket League Cinematic Film
Made in Unreal Engine 5
"It was 2016. I'm at my home launching Rocket League. The splash screen boots up playing this song 'Breathing Underwater' at the back. Everything just felt... right..." This whole video was made centering this one particular feeling I had.
THIS IS ROCKET LEAGUE!! but the moments before the match begin.
Original and Color-graded Image Renders/Wallpapers - https://imgur.com/a/OV5wDAi
Asset Links at the end of this post.
This whole project took me about a month to plan and execute. This is one of the projects I had very little turnaround time to work with. I'd come off from work at office everyday and immediate start working on this during the night. The city environment and tunnel shots were done in a single day of stretch. Impressive, isn't it :D
ModeLLing the stadium
Since I couldn't actually find a model of the Champions Field stadium, I decided to model it.
Below is a sped up video of the whole recordings modelling sessions. Around 30% of the project's time was towards modelling this stadium.
You can also 3D view and free download this model on the below Sketchfab link, have fun!
LIGHTING
Majority of the work in this project is about Lighting and framing of the shots. For this single cut rotation shot at the start of the film, I wanted to bring the emotion in each environment through it's lighting setup. This was crucial for me. While the whole world saw Rocket League as a stylized, fun and a goofy-looking game, I wanted to showcase it in a different way.
In UE, I used both Raytracing and Lumen system for variety of shots. All lights are dynamic.
I animated the intensity of each light in Sequencer for the Lights switch-on for the Stadium shots.
For controlling the emissive materials for our Lights faking, I created a parameter in MPC, and used that to control intensity of all the emissive textures. Then, I animated this value in Sequencer that controlled all the Emissive materials on scene.
Animating the car
I used this sick and easy Maya tool, 'UAC Rig' by Simon Mills to rig and animate the car.
"But, all this for a car to drive in a straight line? You could have done this with simple mesh rotation for wheels through a Blueprint!" (that's what I actually did for the Fennec) - Trust me, the plan was big. Our hero car wasn't supposed to just drive in a straight line. I really frikking wanted to have it drive in curves with some good physics sim happening on body and wheels.
I planned a shot where the Octane and the Fennec would romantically race against each other (like, from the 'Cars' movie!). But nope, I had just about 4 more days left on the project and I had to make do with what was practically achievable in set time.
Maybe, next time. Cars are fun to work with anyways.
"But, all this for a car to drive in a straight line? You could have done this with simple mesh rotation for wheels through a Blueprint!" (that's what I actually did for the Fennec) - Trust me, the plan was big. Our hero car wasn't supposed to just drive in a straight line. I really frikking wanted to have it drive in curves with some good physics sim happening on body and wheels.
I planned a shot where the Octane and the Fennec would romantically race against each other (like, from the 'Cars' movie!). But nope, I had just about 4 more days left on the project and I had to make do with what was practically achievable in set time.
Maybe, next time. Cars are fun to work with anyways.
City Environment
Initially, I tried several methods to do the city layout generation through Blueprinting, third-party plugins and through Foliage actors. I realized learning these would itself take quite some days. So, I plugged off everything and decided to place the buildings manually, actor-by-actor. It was time consuming for sure, but also it gave me full control over my workflow to balance the frame wrt cinematics.
The bridge was one thing I was particularly unhappy about, but again, the... Timee!!
The bridge was one thing I was particularly unhappy about, but again, the... Timee!!
The Beloved Balloon Audience
The following is the material lookdev I did for the Balloon and it's animation. The next following image is the BP that's responsible for spawning each ballon with a random hue of color, the team color, random intensity and speed of the world position offset (the whole sway animation).
I really wonder how the devs did the whole balloons thing officially in-game and managed to achieve a good performance out of it. This version of mine really bit me back while rendering the final shots. I had about 80k balloon BP actors in scene and I couldn't even manage to render a signle scene in 1080p. Hence, the poor old scaled-up 720p shot on the final film.
I really wonder how the devs did the whole balloons thing officially in-game and managed to achieve a good performance out of it. This version of mine really bit me back while rendering the final shots. I had about 80k balloon BP actors in scene and I couldn't even manage to render a signle scene in 1080p. Hence, the poor old scaled-up 720p shot on the final film.
Rendered in
Unreal Engine 5.0.2
Assets
Music
