>> Quixel is a company that has a very simple mission.
We want to capture the entire world
and we want to build a library out of
everything that exists in real life.
All of us are artists. We come from various backgrounds
in VFX and games and we always kind of wanted to
get into the art again.
And also, we wanted to help prove that
photorealism is now actually possible in real-time,
but also that it's incredibly simple.
Iceland is one of the most magical places on this earth.
It is the source of inspiration for a lot of movies
and a lot of games.
We've been drawn to that location for a long time.
We spent about a month there. Came back with about
a thousand Assets that became the palette for Rebirth.
Rebirth is a real-time cinematic in 4k resolution,
running at 24 FPS, in Unreal Engine 4.
>> It was just a perfect opportunity for us to
put our money where our mouth is,
let's make something with our stuff.
>> Our biggest fear was that we were bringing people together
for the first time, from all different industries.
We worked with three game artists,
being directed by a VFX supervisor,
art directed by an actual architect.
>> My initial reaction was, you've got to be kidding me.
We are not a production company, we do not have a pipeline.
I come from a CG background and just knowing everything that
it takes to pull this off, we don't have that.
But then, as we started talking, we have some incredible talent
and they were able to get the Assets in the Engine,
get some really basic lighting in there,
and it was just working. It was like,
wow, this isn't going to be that hard.
>> Going into this, I was actually terrified
because I had never done these huge scale environments
or ArchViz style interiors, exteriors, which rely heavily
on lighting and atmospherics.
But the features in Unreal, such as the Volumetric Fog,
the lighting, all that kind of stuff,
just made it super easy to use.
>> We're incredibly nerdy about quality,
and so we have these controlled pipelines that
allow us to capture an insane amount of detail.
It allowed us to reach 90 percent quality for
every single shot in just a single day per shot.
>> Each shot was handled by one artist.
Which meant set dressing, lighting, VFX,
fog cards, the animation in the camera,
even the post-processing effects like film grain,
chromatic abberation, the vignetting, was all done
with one guy, one shot.
The shots were looking so incredible and
so high fidelity that we had to make sure that the cameras
felt real. We hired someone that created a rig that was
motion capture, that we could essentially make a
virtual cameraman inside of our scenes.
We even went as far as, he was just holding the rig
and his heartbeat was driving the movement.
>> All the tools in Unreal are so approachable and
easily accessible, easy to use.
There's a specific shot in the cinematic,
you're inside the cockpit, you're speeding through
the environment, and you see all this bleeping and blooping,
like the EKG monitor.
That was a shot that actually appeared really late
in the production, but using the tools,
especially the Material Editor, in combination with Blueprint
Editor, I think I had the first draft of that shot
done in seven hours.
>> Our key takeaway from this is that real-time
is the workflow that will allow all 3D industries
to ultimately converge.
Everyone will be leveraging this toolset.
>> Looking back at it, I would do it again.
I want to do it again and again and again,
because I've grown so much and learned so much
and just the fact that I could actually learn so much
during production, just shows how powerful Unreal Engine is.
>> The process of me learning a new pipeline and
learning how this could be achieved,
has been an incredible experience and my eyes are
open to the power of working in real-time and
I can genuinely say-- and I don't think I could have
said this a couple months ago-- is, I'm excited for the next one.