For the documentary The Miraculous Transformation of the Working Class into Foreigners – animations using Unreal Engine: boxing clouds using VDBs.

Using EmberGen one more time, we created this fighting scene between communist icons; Marx, Trotzki, Lenin and Luxemburg in Unreal Engine. I first started to animate the characters in Modo, imported it into Embergen to create the VDBs, then exported those into UE to animate. The bases for the animation were Mixamo animations, with the heads sourced from other stores and cut/merged onto the bodies. Because import/export + rendering of VDBs can be really time consuming, especially when having so many of them, this was not practical when doing many iterations for the choreography & tweaking the motions. Initially we also thought to use some Motion Capturing we did, but since this was done for Metahumans and we didn’t use Metahumans for the clouds, we scrapped that.

The final workflow I’ve developed and which worked quite well was to import all the edited Mixamo files (with the correct heads) into Unreal Engine, and having them there directly in the timeline editor to work with animation layers to create the choreography. This was then – before “clouding” it – rendered and finalised together with the director. When the choreography was agreed upon, I took the whole animation into Embergen, created the VDBs and then got it back into UE. This way everything was already framed & timed correctly for the final image before doing the time-intensive VDB tweaks/creation.

Here, as in scene 5 – since the project was done in UE 5.1, there was no “official” VDB workflow available, so I implemented these in Unreal using Thibault Lambert’s VDB workflow.

Done as the 3D Art & project lead together with my team at Blindflug Studios, direction with Dschoint Ventschr.