All right.

we're done with pre-production you should have a list of all the shots that you need to make from there you can sort of pinpoint like who's doing what what do we need to make do we need to make a custom animation for this shot can we make this in engine do we need something external blah blah blah at this point you should have gotten all your paneling done and that's when we head into production

And this is where the grind starts, at least for us when we're making satisfactory stuff, because for our trailers, we usually have a lot of factories in our shots and making these factories take a really, really, really, really long time.

When we make trailers, I kid you not, I think like 80% of the time working on trailers is just building factories.

There's so much effort that goes into that.

We also have a tendency to keep upping ourselves.

I think in the beginning, we always made very simplistic factories, and now we have these city-wide factories.

And it's kind of your fault, honestly, because we see all these cool builds within the community and we see like, wow, that looks so cool.

We need to sort of try and emulate that.

And yeah, it takes so much time.

And as an example here for the 1.0 trailer, the big factory like at the end of that trailer, that one took Linus 242 hours to build just for those shots.

So a lot of time and effort goes into this for those like seconds of on-screen time.

Now you might be wondering like, why don't you just reuse like save files from community or, you know, like ask someone else to build a factory and then just, you know, use that in your trailer.

Um, and you can do that sometimes.

Uh, and we've done that in the past, but for a lot of times when we're making something very specific, you kind of want to build the factory around the shot rather than trying to build a shot around a factory, if that makes sense.

Like when you're composing these shots and we have a very like specific framing in mind or a very specific composition in mind, it's very, very, very difficult to place that in an existing factory.

Usually what we need to do is we need to build a factory around the shot.

um and it's really frustrating because it takes a lot of time but we do get a lot better results in fact for the announcement trailer there's like four different factories for like the same scene like there's one factory when you see like the the establishing shot with the coffee stain logo and then when we're close to the ground that's a different factory that i rebuilt and then when the pioneer starts running that's a different factory

and then there's like a different factory based on like which angle you're looking from like when we have something very specific in mind we have to sort of build the factories around the shots so let's take a look at the announcement trailer shots and and sort of talk about them as well so here's what the game looks like in engine usually when we build factories for our shots we usually just boot up the game like regular and you know have like advanced game settings on and unlimited build mode and stuff like that

and just build away sometimes it's nice to build an engine but the engine is a lot more expensive to run than just the game in general so we i at least try to avoid that as much as possible but sometimes you do like need references like sometimes it's nice for instance this character down here for instance i can pull i can i can move this around and place it wherever i need it to instead of you know being in the game and trying to like place things down and figure things out and figure scale out and all that stuff

So when we're working on shots, we use a tool called the Sequencer in Unreal Engine.

And the Sequencer is basically, you know, being able to create a timeline and be able to have things move in time and whatnot.

And this is what that tool looks like in Unreal Engine.

It's basically like a, it looks like any kind of timeline tool where you have like a play head and whatnot.

And you can't see all the gizmos and whatnot when we're in play mode.

So usually you can see where the camera is in 3D space and whatnot.

So you'll just have to imagine that.

But basically, I can create the camera here and I can see what it looks like when I'm playing and moving it around.

Right now, there's a lot of optimization running.

So for instance, the building lags a lot, as you may notice.

So yeah, here I can basically, you know, get an overlay of what the shot will look like and, you know, move the camera around and place it in the world.

I can even like move around and it will save this.

So like, this will be a really strange animation here.

So like, whoa, look at that, you know, stuff like that.

So this is,

the tool that we use when we create all the shots for our trailers.

It is very nice to use the Sequencer because it's very deterministic.

Using the Sequencer, we can really play in sequence and create these kind of shots.

Sometimes we record straight from gameplay, so we'll play the game and record footage, and that's really useful when we have multiplayer sessions, when we want to showcase first-person shots of things happening and very specific things going on that are a little bit more complex to be able to create in the Sequencer, because in the Sequencer, you have to manually create all these things.

For instance, in the opening shot for the Update 6 trailer, the car coming in and stopping, I had to manually animate that.

Sometimes it's nice to just play the game and just have it come in and break.

But when you do that, it's a little bit more tricky to get things timed properly.

So working in the Sequencer is really the preferred way of doing things.

Because when you work in the Sequencer, you know that you get the shot.

Otherwise, we'd have to get recording sessions running.

And if you have multiplayer, you need multiple people, so obviously that's a little bit tricky.

We actually have an example of that with the 1.0 trailer when we made the shot for the trucks coming into frame.

Oh, that looks so good.

Oh, this was the take.

Guys, this was the take.

This was the best take we've done.

Holy shit.

So yeah, here you have it.

Here's the scene.

We can actually fly around a bit.

You may have noticed that the logo for CoffeeScene is an actual physical thing in the world.

We decided to do this instead of superimposing it in post because we felt like this saved a lot of time.

We also had more, it was easier to replace it.

And there's also stuff like this where like the manta, for instance, over here, like that's also animated.

So I can control exactly where it is in the frame and whatnot.

And same thing with like all the planets and all that stuff.

I can position them perfectly in the world.

You can see that like I have this planet over here.

This is actually scripted so I can actually like move this around so that it's perfectly in frame.

So like here I set the actual like position of it and whatever.

like how it's rotated in the screen and where it is and whatnot so like all these things are very meticulously planned out for the sequencer to get the shot that we want and the main thing i want to draw your attention to here is like the factory looks like this for this opening shot and in the next shot it looks completely different like suddenly there's all this thing here continuation wise it doesn't make much sense um but this shot is like really nice uh you know and uh

Yeah, it's really important for us to get the composition down because in the heat of the moment, you're not going to see these two shots and be like, actually, the factory doesn't look exactly the same.

I mean, you will, but that's not really important.

The important thing is that the shots tell what they're supposed to tell.

And in this case, it's the pioneer going, oh, shit, my little tummy.

And then we have this close up of the pioneer going like that.

And then we switch back and the pioneer looks around.

and obviously we have the shot where it's just assuming maybe i'll load that in and then the pioneer runs away and like here's the block out of that shot where we just get like poses and whatever and try and figure out and you know they're kind of similar like they have this they don't have the exact same composition um but you know you get the point and especially this run

cycle

perfect and there's a lot of stuff going on as well like for instance there's we've added a bunch of lights here to like make the background look nice and like this purple light here which like comes from the i already forgot what this product is called but like we try to spruce it up a little bit and and you know add a couple of lights here and there to to make it uh look nicer and you know add a little bit of the depth of field and that kind of stuff to make it look nice

Once we've finished all these shots and we have them ready, what we do is we just plug them into this kind of batch program where we then run them and render them.

So we take advantage of the Unreal Engine render pipeline, which means that it will sort of like boot up the game and then it will render out the sequence.

Now, the cool thing with the render pipeline is that it is possible to make sure that the game, you know, you always get perfect like 60 FPS.

This trailer was made in 24,

fps because 24 is usually like a little bit more gets you a little bit more like cinematic feel rather than like gameplay feel but the uh 1.0 trailer was made in 60 fps uh because we wanted that to like actually look like the game and play sort of like the game in a way it wasn't as important that it was cinematic as much as you know

showcasing the game itself.

And the thing with the render pipeline as well is that like, you know, everything that we do for our trailers, they're all in-game.

Like we're using in-game assets.

It's not like a, it is pre-rendered, but we're not like adding things that you wouldn't be able to have yourself in the game.

Now, granted we are, you know,

using the render pipeline to be able to have no loading, for instance, so everything looks crisp in the background, making sure that all animations run perfectly.

We might have humongous factories that are going to run perfectly smooth in 60 FPS when you render, but maybe not on the same machine.

And this is a little bit of a tricky...

balancing act that we have to play with constantly because we want the game, we want our trailers to sort of reflect what you're going to get when you play the game.

But you obviously won't have like this, all these depth of field and all the cinematic stuff.

So it's a,

Yeah, it's a line we have to draw somewhere, you know, as to how detailed we can make it look.

But theoretically, it is possible to make the game look exactly like they do in the trailers.

But, you know, realistically, most people probably won't have, you know, as nice looking, you know,

settings for all this stuff and have it run this smooth.

There's an argument to say like, oh, this is a little bit deceiving, and I totally get that.

This is something that we constantly have to think about, especially also when we're doing like post-production and doing color grading.

We also try to, you know, we want to do a little bit of color grading, but sometimes it looks too off and then people notice that.

And, you know, yeah, it's you need to like look at our trailers and be like, yeah, that is the game mostly.

We don't want to deceive anyone, but we do want to make it look as nice as it can possibly be.

And like I mentioned before, all these animations that I'm playing right now, they've been created in Maya by our animator, and then I created the mock-up animation in Control Rig.

But at the end of the day, it's our animator sitting with Maya and then importing it into Unreal Engine to make it fit and whatnot.

And then we have this shot with the Pioneer running, all the stuff in the foreground and whatnot.

And yeah, there's a lot going on in this shot.

For this, I've added particles in the background.

So when the Pioneer jumps over the thing, for instance, you can see the particles in the background fly off.

They look really nice.

with the bokeh here, the depth of field and there's like slow motion going on.

And then like this, this get like the particles from the hand playing here.

So you can see the smoke here going off.

Her hand is on fire.

One really nice thing with the sequencer is that it's really easy for me to compose with all the elements that we have in the game and sort of put them together.

So for instance, this shot where the pioneer is running, like the regular sprint animation here is just the running animation from the game that I've just sped up a little bit.

It's been sped up by like 15% basically.

And then when she jumps, that's like a custom animation.

uh that was made with just the jump in and then i just like tweak it and time it into the run sequence um in the sequencer as you can see so you can see here like right how it weighs into um you know and i can i can move this around so like if i wanted the pioneer to jump earlier i could move this over here and you can see her like

fading into the jump here and completely missing the mark.

So it's really easy to tweak these things in Engine and pinpoint animations and whatnot.

And the same thing here, she's running and then we have a separate slide animation here.

So I basically just take all these different animations and just take what I need and put them in the timeline and time them up and just pick and choose what I need for the animation in the whole sequence.

When you're playing the game in general, we do have a bunch of effects here going off when it's building stuff, but we needed a bit more.

We needed to juice it up a bit more for the traders, so I added a ton of these spark effects that I made myself custom, by the way.

uh like better high and like different angles so it shows up better in the shot uh you'd be surprised how much you need to cheat to make it look good and like for this shot here um i've added like vfx here to the right so you see like little sparks um there's also a ton of lighting change here so there's a ton of like lights that turn on as she gets closer to it uh and like there's a spotlight on the hub that also like

emphasizes the exposure, so I turned down the exposure a bit so that like the hub stands out a bit more.

I add like more chromatic aberration as she gets closer to the hub, like to really like drive that feeling of like that dread, like, oh, I need to go.

I'm about to fucking shit my pants, you know, just like drive that further in and also doing this like Hitchcock effect.

where I am panning the camera back, but I'm zooming in.

And that gives this weird feeling where things in the background become smaller.

So you see these refineries in the background.

And it's sort of a similar situation there.

I had to build these refineries in such a specific location so that they would show up perfectly in frame.

uh so i i legit had to set up this composition and then like build and move these factors around to make sure that when you get this hedgecock effect that like they would move properly and look weird and all that stuff um so so yeah this this shot there's a lot of stuff going on in this shot

And then, like, as she runs into the frame, we have this other pioneer reacting to it.

Fun fact, this, like, running thing here, that's from the block.

We didn't change that at all.

We thought it was funny if, like, the turn and this all looked so dumb.

So we just kept it.

It kind of plays into the whole goofiness of it.

Uh, because, like, really, like, the whole trailer is so, like, dramatic up until this shot, and, like, this shot is just, like, this is where, you know, the punchline is.

So it's fine if it looks weird and goofy and-and whatever.

And, like, really, when we're making all these shots, like, we're just going back and forth constantly, uh, with everyone in the-in the-in the trailer task force team.

Uh, you know...

looking at the shots, you know, having artists like draw on it on the frame and be like, it would be nice if you move this.

The composition is a bit weird.

We're just like constantly iterating on these shots, not only animation, but also composition and lighting and, you know, all these effects and just like constantly render out shots and updating like our little walkout video.

And eventually, you know, our little temp

video that we made with storyboards are replaced with, you know, shots that are in work in progress.

And then eventually they're replaced by new shots.

And eventually you have a trailer and just like keep iterating all these things.

And eventually you get to the point where you just have a trailer and

And, you know, make adjustments to make sure that the lighting works for the shot.

So for instance, here in this shot, I have a little bit of a rim light on the Pioneer to just make her stand out a little bit better against the background and stuff like that.

And we just go through scene by scene and add all these like little tweaks here and there to make sure that

everything works and then once we have all these shots set up in sequencer we just put it in the render queue and then we set uh start the render and when we start the render it will sort of apply all these like max settings to the render to make sure that it looks neat

and like it will do its own anti-aliasing pass so it kind of upscales the image and then renders it at a higher resolution and then downscales it and stuff like that so we get like maximum quality on the render and this takes absolutely forever and it's really stressful because when you're on a tight deadline and you constantly have to wait for renders uh it it it's really stressful

you know running the game at these like high settings and like loading in so many things is quite taxing on the system and as an example uh the last shot for the 1.0 trailer took 21 hours to render and it failed twice during that render when we were doing that um and it was really clutch the final render for that shot was made it was finished on the same day as we released um 1.0 so

uh

Yeah, it's, oh boy, clutch.