Those About to Die

Working on Those About to Die was an incredibly rewarding experience, offering me the chance to dive deep into the history of ancient Rome and its iconic games. It was not only a pleasure to explore this rich subject matter, but also an opportunity to return to more art-focused work after spending a lot of time doing mostly technical tasks. The project made extensive use of ICVFX, with relatively minimal post-production VFX and clean-up, which meant our VP content had to meet exceptionally high standards. We faced the challenge of creating vast, detailed environments, pushing the limits of UE5, and coming up with creative solutions to bring those scenes to life. I believe early shots were pre-rendered as large 360-degree renders that matched the dimensions of the LED volume, offering more stability during shoots but that came with drawbacks such as longer turnaround times for content changes and a tendency for the visuals to appear too flat.

 Circus Maximus

We began work on the Circus Maximus with a VFX model, so a lot of my time was spent optimizing it for real-time for real-time use. This involved extensive re-topping and baking. The wall and entrance below the emperor's seating area were practical set pieces in some shots but not in others, so I modeled and sculpted a digital replica, as no scan was provided.

The entire arena was textured using a masked material workflow. This approach involved baking large mask UDIM  textures for sections of the structure to blend various tiling materials and dirt layers. This method allowed for large, weathered surfaces to maintain a good texel density while minimizing the number of draw calls.

Colosseum

This wasn’t my first time working on a Colosseum environment so it was all pretty familiar to me. The original model was created for VFX, so we had to completely remodel it to optimize it for real-time use and ensure compatibility with Nanite and Lumen. For texturing, we employed the same baked mask layered material workflow used for the Circus Maximus.

I also made a shader for the canvas roof canopies. It had fake emissive-based sub-surface scattering as Unreal's SSS wasn't giving the desired results visually. It also had some subtle wind movement.  

The colosseum environment was reused for The Bet in the Dimension and DNEG 360 showcase ‘The Evolution of Virtual Production project with some dressing changes.

Colosseum Exterior Building Site

I did a lot of work on the Colosseum construction site, focusing on dressing and layout. Drawing from research into Roman building methods, I kitbashed various construction prefabs, including stonemasons' and carpenters' stations, planners' tents, and other elements. I used these along with piles of building materials and scattered debris to dress much of the scene. Additionally, I did a big pass on the colosseum scaffolding, which involved reconstructing sections, adding additional dressing, and retexturing all the pieces. I also created animated buckets on ropes, which were hoisted up to different scaffolding levels, adding some movement to the background along with some animated cranes and workers created by other artists.

I set up in-depth look dev material controls for a lot of the elements across scenes such as the main landmarks like the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine as well as more general things like the stone ground material that was universally used across environments. This allowed the on-set team to fine-tune the look of much of the scene from a centralized blueprint and to help with the alignment of the virtual and practical sets.

Women's Entrance

I was responsible for most of the dressing for the women’s entrance  I was given a lot of free rein with this one which made it an especially enjoyable process. 

I kitbashed several Roman buildings and insulae to use in the background of this scene and for artists to use in several other scenes as the buildings we had previously were pretty low-res and didn't hold as well close to the camera. 

Graveyard

I collaborated with a small team on the graveyard environment, where I handled the majority of the dressing for the graveyard itself. Drawing inspiration from Rome’s Verano Monumental Cemetery, I used lots of Megscans assets to build up the sloped round.  Additionally, I retextured many of the grave and tomb meshes to enhance their visual quality.

I also worked a lot on all of the foliage materials and set up a blue blueprint for global foliage look dev controls.