BIOHAZARD BOT Short Cinematic

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Contributions:

  • Modeling and texturing

  • Rigging

  • Character animations

  • Environment

  • Lighting

  • Shot assembly in sequencer

  • Camera animations

  • Material Graphs

Environment Materials

One of the big references for the environment were the corridors in Alien and the machines in The Matrix. To that end, I enhanced the detail of the base environment mesh with a kitbashing pack of sci-fi pipes. Nanite really sped up the workflow here because it allowed me to throw everything I wanted at it and make the environment very detailed, very quickly. By design, these meshes had no UVs or textures so I created a custom material that used triplanar projection with noise textures to give the meshes that bumpy greasy black metal style seen in The Matrix.

Screenshots

Click on the images for full size

About the project

I originally started this project a few years ago as a learning project to get familiar with Unreal 4 and working with sequencer. I did the rigging and character animations, along with basic lighting and environment. But since it was primarily a personal learning project, I didn’t take it to full completion or post it anywhere.

Recently I decided to revisit it and go all the way with it, with a special focus on the lighting. To that end, I upgraded the project to Unreal 5 so I could leverage all the latest features. In particular I was interested in Lumen, Nanite, Megalights, and rendering to .EXR via Movie Render Graph. I fleshed out the geometry of the environment and added lots of detail, updated the materials, overhauled the lighting, and enhanced it with volumetrics. Modeling, rigging, and animation was done in 3ds Max and Zbrush. For audio, I collaborated with the talented West Paglia to handle the music and sound design. Rendering was done using Lumen for lighting (not pathtracer) and Adobe Premiere was used for minor tweaks, titles, and adding film grain in post.

The project is based on the story of an indie game I developed and released on Steam back in 2017 called BHB: BIOHAZARD BOT.

Lighting Design

Lighting was a big focus for this cinematic. I wanted to lean into classic sci-fi so I used a number of movies as reference. In particular, the original Alien was a big influence, along with Evil Dead, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Matrix Trilogy.

The story starts out with the BioHazard Bot on patrol when it hears strange noises and goes to investigate. To compliment this, after the initial reveal, the lighting on the hero starts out relatively well lit with stronger key and fill lights, and then as he gets closer to danger, the lighting style shifts to emphasize the rim lighting and dark shadows. Cool color tones emphasize coldness and creepiness while the warmer colors on the spider creature are used to signal threat.

Ground Fog Shader

Leaning into the horror movie aesthetic, one thing I had fun with was the volumetric fog that hangs on the floor during the first few shots. It’s a 3d mesh that uses a custom volumetric shader with scrolling 3d noise and camera-based depth fade, and has a variety of exposed controls for fine-tuning.


For the final result, the important thing of course was subtlety. It needed to be noticeable enough to embellish the shots shot and help establish the tone of the scene, but not so much that it distracts from the focus on the hero. Getting it just right involved a lot of iteration and test renders to get the right balance of density, color, movement speed, etc.

Light Material Functions

One underrated feature that should be in every lighting artist’s arsenal is Light Material Functions (“Cookies” in Unity). It’s basically a way where you can use a texture as a cutout for the light.

The most common usage is for things like spotlights with a specific pattern, like for a flashlight or company logo. However, they’re also a great way to get art-directed environment shadows with good performance since the shadows don’t need to be calculated every frame. They’re also a great way to art direct volumetric lightshafts.

Visual References

Alien (1979)

The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

The Evil Dead (1981)

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)