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DISCOVERY / A Journey Through Star Trek - Part 4

  • Fausto Tejeda
  • Sep 30, 2024
  • 4 min read

Updated: Sep 30, 2024

creativeprocess

  • PXO faced a new challenge in determining the number of portals, their contents, and their appearance. Effective communication between our team and the Art Department facilitated a seamless workflow. In collaboration with the Director/Executive Producer, a hallway map was drawn out to indicate the contents of each portal, and where the light and dark areas were. We also had to incorporate our favorite elements into this environment...moving clouds.


technicalfacts

  • The main challenge was the look. How could we make an “infinity” hallway be visually appealing AND be performant on the Volume. We did several concepts to further refine what the Art Dept provided us, and together with the set lidar scan of the walkway, we layed everything out. For the contents inside the windows, we had several specific locations that had to be displayed, with which our actors would interact with. For a few of these locations, we were provided with footage (or reference stills), and for the rest of the content we used our own elements. We sourced some fantastic hi-res 360 HDR content, that had the right look and textures we needed, and a few of these were then touched up with DMP. In UE, we then used a WindowBox system on flat geometry to achieve the illusion of perspective and, which as the camera moved, each window looked as if there was an infinitely deep environment inside. The rest came down to refining the look of the boxes/planes themselves to be sleek and to match the aesthetic of the environment.

  • While working on the portals, we faced another challenging task: creating realistic clouds. Achieving the appearance of translucency, scale, and movement is no easy feat. Due to performance limitations, we opted for a 2D approach. We used a VDB pack of animated clouds, rendered them from various perspectives, and strategically positioned them in the scene to achieve the desired look.


  • One thing we tend to avoid is small details going off into the distance, so we don't get any flickering on the wall. In order to mitigate this, we simply trnasitions from geometry to textures on flat geo to emulate the look of an endless tunnel. This also gave us the added flexibility to tweak these sections as you would 2D elements with ease.



  • Another new achievement this season, was the light at the end of the tunnel. Given our success with the sunlight rig in Q’Mau, we used a similar methodology for the sun in this environment. SFX team built a robotic stand, holding a single, bright light source, that would move around our Volume to match the position of our virtual sunlight. The only hiccup was the slight delay to the movement of the robot. Given the 1 day turnaround time to build it, it worked very well. To help with integration, production had plants, lights, and fire installed under the floor platforms, to help indicate what environments were underneath.



creativeprocess

  • This environment was the most difficult of them all to dial in. It was an environment covered entirely of flowers, and had both a daytime and night-time lighting scenarios. With the addition of shooting stars, it made for a very ethereal setting.


technicalfacts

  • We faced a few technical limitations in Unreal, because we couldn’t use nano mesh with vegetation at the time. Thus, we needed to thoroughly optimize our plants to be performant. As well, adding SSS on the flowers had to be cheated, because it wasn't possible to add it to thousands of flowers and still be performant on the Volume.

  • For the falling stars, we used a Niagara particle system in UE during the blend days, so we could get direct feedback from our Director/EP. We also had clouds (the same clouds we had rendered and put on cards) all throughout the background.

  • The final challenge on this environment came with blending. The practical flowers (which were also fake) all had some subtle SSS, as well as some direct light hitting them from above. Everytime the would do any kind of crane movement, the lighting on the flowers directly next to the wall would vary slightly, and would disrupt the blend. We implemented our custom transition CCR to mitigate the issue, but in some shots it’s still clearly visible.


  • The night-time environment was a smoother experience, and we didn’t face much, if any, issues when it came time to blend. Needless to say, we also didn’t get any time during our blend days to test this lighting scenario, and had to make it work during the shoot.

  • There are rows of floating light poles in both versions of these environments, for which we added color and intensity controls, along with the pattern of lights seen on the floor. The shoot for the night-time environment went very smooth and we were performant through our entire shoot.


conclusion

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