“You’re not working in the final context of how your work is going to be seen, so there’s a lot of guessing and checking—a lot of making changes that might take days, weeks, or months to see the ripple effect. When you’re working in real time, that’s completely shortened. You’re able to see your impact almost instantaneously.”More often than not, that feeling was met with excitement. When siloed departments can start working together simultaneously, updating becomes an invigorating experience. Typically, that process started with cubes, cylinders, and previs assets created by the cinematic directors—all of which could now be worked on during layout, while the final assets were in production. The team could then use Blueprints, sub-level nesting, landscape sculpting, and stand-in props to keep production moving for the Animation, Cinematics, Lighting, and Tech divisions. Once the models were final, they could swap or update them easily in engine.
“Every day was like a new present to our eyes every time we synced all the files in Perforce and pressed play on the reopened project in Sequencer,” says Christina Douk, 3D Asset Supervisor at Disney. “It made iterating in engine so much fun and interesting, and kept the production feeling inspired as we moved forward.”
Real-time 3D filmmaking tools
Unreal Engine’s filmmaking tools replicate the tools you’d find on a physical set. Early on in the project, Droste went into the engine and roughed out the story by himself. “It was great—I was able to take this digital sandbox to go from my head to building this thing in engine,” he says.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog