Unreal Engine, Looking Glass Portrait, C4D Simulations

First, am I the only person that didn’t realize Unreal Engine is free* to use? This is huge news to me, particularly because I backed the Looking Glass Portrait project on Kickstarter at the beginning of the year. The units should be shipping out soon and Unreal Engine is one of the primary production tools for it. I can barely contain my excitement for this thing. I’m rarely an early adopter of new technologies, mainly because the barrier to entry is usually high (generally the price point), but this is different. Expect some posts and project files around the Portrait later this year.

I’ve been working with some simulations in Cinema 4D recently and adding volumetric lighting and expanding on the moody look I went for with the previous volumetric lighting experiments. I tried working with both sim caching and baking as an alembic, but I ended up with weird problems in the render with the alembic method. Performance was great in the viewport, but Redshift rendered some bizarre smears in the file it kicked out, which didn’t show up in the IPR. I eventually went back to the unbaked version and cached the physics simulation to keep it consistent and speed up viewport performance. Cinema recalculates the physics simulation on render each time it goes through a render, but did you know it’ll re-run the simulation if you render, say, half the frames, let it finish, then run the second half? Makes sense, but I found out the hard way by rendering about a second’s worth of frames to see the result, then rendered the second half when I liked it. The second half had a different fracture simulation, so it jumped halfway through the animation. Just had to cache it in the dynamics tag.

I like how this one is looking, but the render times are getting prohibitively high. I’d love to double up my graphics card (RTX 2070 Super) to get back in the game, but the semi-conductor shortage and cryptomining craze has quadrupled the cost of this card. Not to mention it’s pretty hard to find now, too.

Anyway, here’s a couple stills of the progress. I’m still putting together the animated renders. I’ll post the project files when those are done.