The Queen Mary Museum 180 3D experience. Full CG animation.
Our team has a great opportunity to work with Queen Mary Museum and their upcoming VR experience. We work side by side with a production crew that filmed 180 3D in Long Beach, California. PLAB team worked on 4 shots for this cinematic VR show. Each scene from 30 to 40 seconds long.
The Queen Mary Museum developing a new immersive experience for their visitors - a stereoscopic VR film about a Queen Mary ship and some key moments in his history. Our task was to create a realistic VR animation(180 3D) that showed Queen Mary ship at mystery night somewhere in the ocean in the middle of the 20th century.
The client came to us with this storyboard images:
The client came to us with this storyboard images:
The First 3 scenes(night shots) was done in Unreal Engine from A to Z with frothier compositing in Nuke. Our team already has previous experience rendering multi-pass images directly from Unreal Engine, but this time we faced another problem - stereoscopic VR rendering. We tested several approaches and finally stay with the built-in Panoramic Capture plugin. It supports multi-pass exr rendering since 4.23, but unfortunately support only 360 format, not 180.
The first iteration was to prepare and optimize the hi-poly stock model for Unreal engine:
Below you can see how we preparing the scene in Unreal Engine. Ocean simulation was created using a Realistic Ocean Simulator plugin from STORM IN A TEACUP.
Scene 4 was the most complex in this project, it's required a smooth transition from drone aerial shot to CGI animation. The hardest part was to track 180 3D video plate. The production crew used Z-cam K1 Pro, so we would like to say thanks to the Z-cam team for providing camera details. Below you can find compositing breakdown:
