Nightfall Rising
It's not a big surprise we all love Star Wars here, and likewise ILM's work and even more their heritage. So, of course, we wanted to make a sci-fi project that captures the feeling we had when seeing these incredible movies in the theaters (or a big screen later), almost like an hommage, but with our own twist to it.
Nightfall Rising
It's not a big surprise we all love Star Wars here, and likewise ILM's work and even more their heritage. So, of course, we wanted to make a sci-fi project that captures the feeling we had when seeing these incredible movies in the theaters (or a big screen later), almost like an hommage, but with our own twist to it.
With Unreal 5 being accessible, it felt like the right moment to try and do it in realtime! Following our work with McLaren, we once again wanted to challenge ourselves to rely on realtime technologies completely for rendering and to keep post production at a minimum (grading, extra flares, grain). There was no other way than to go for an analog look, something reminiscent of the original Star Wars trilogy, and thankfully Unreal Engine has a lot of possibilities to get a very good base for that look.
Unreal 5 is insane with Lumen and Nanite, allowing us to have more flexibility with lighting and using many high-density meshes. Using this new production pipeline, different to our usual CGI animation workflow, presented unforeseen challenges, but we were able to overcome them and get to where we wanted to land – pun intended. We added the next part to our personal project list because we are motivated to turn this into a short series of videos in the future. We hope to find the time again in the foreseeable future to work on the next part.

We hope you'll enjoy!