Wagoneer B-Roll - Unity Works
3DS Max // Maya // Unreal Engine 5 - Blueprints
I led the creation of this b-roll footage of the Jeep Wagoneer and Jeep Grand Wagoneer models, for our Unity Works team who provide media to dealerships nationwide. As the supervisor of the 3D team, I managed a talented group of 3D artists to produce the footage they needed when the vehicles weren’t available for a live shoot. We used Maya and 3DS Max to optimize the models, and used Unreal Engine to rig, animate, and render the final footage. The environments we put together included a detailed forest road and a lakeside highway where the vehicles were shown towing a boat which I also rigged using control rigs in Unreal. Each model was rendered in different environments and three paint colors, showcasing the vehicles in diverse and appealing settings.
As the Lead Developer and Team Lead, I was responsible for overseeing the project, ensuring the quality and realism of the final footage, keeping within OEM guidelines. I was hands-on with our 3D artists on this project, utilizing Unreal Engine and 3DS Max to rig the vehicles and create detailed environments. I also developed blueprints to animate the vehicles along specified paths and ensured the project adhered to company guidelines.
I learned from the examples that Epic created for the Unreal engine to base our blueprints and rigs. Setting up a hierarchy in the blueprint for parenting objects to bones meant we didn’t have to skin the vehicle’s meshes to the bones was integral in creating a variety of vehicle Blueprints quickly and easily.
We reproduced a lot of what Epic provided in their control rig example to create rotation in the wheels, but we did have to modify more than a few things for our needs. We added a sphere trace based suspension, and a few things that allowed us to animate the rig along a path without breaking the wheel rotation.
This was a really fun internal project. We had been working with Unreal for some other projects but really got to have fun with it on this one. Even after a few years it still blows my mind what it can do in real time!
