January 17th, 2025 Video

Production

https://youtube.com/embed/s7H3vrje1nQ?autoplay=1&start=1320&end=2395

Topics

• Embracer Group > Coffee Stain Holding > Coffee Stain Studios
• Satisfactory Updates > Teasers & Trailers

Transcript

right so now that 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 make make 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 planning done and that's when we head into production and this is where the grind starts, at least for us from 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 H when we make trailers I kid you not I think like 80% of the time, working on trailers is just building factories, it it there's so much effort that goes into that we also have a tendency to keep like upping ourselves I think in the in the beginning we always made like very simplistic factories and now we have like these Citywide 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 Lena's 242 hours to build just for those shots, so a lot of time and effort goes into this, for those like seconds of of on screen

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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, and you can do that sometimes, 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, 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 then you see like the the establishing shot with the cof stain logo and then when we're closer 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 the 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 announcment 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 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 whoops 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 have we used 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 unre engine it's basically like a it looks like any kind of timeline Tool, where you have like a playhead and whatnot, and you can't see all the gizmos and whatnot, when we're in play mode, so like usually you can see like where the camera is in 3D space and whatnot, so you'll just have to imagine that, but basically I can like create the camera here you know and I can like, see like 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 but 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 a sequencer because it's very deterministic using the sequencer we can really like play in sequence and create these kind of shots, sometimes we record straight from gameplay so like we'll play the game and record footage and that's really useful when we have like multiplayer sessions where we like want to showcase like 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 sequence ER because in the sequence you have to like manually create all these things, for instance in the opening shot for the update 6 trailer you know the car coming in and stopping I had to I had to manually animate that sometimes it's nice to just like play the game and just have it come in and break but when you do that it's a little bit more tricky to think get things timed properly so working in the sequencer is really like the preferred way of doing things because when you're work in the sequencer you know that you get the shot, otherwise we'd have to like get recording sessions running and if you have multiplayer you need multiple people so obviously that 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 good oh this was oh this was the take guys this was the take this was the best take we've done holy so yeah here here you have it here's the scene, we can actually fly around a bit you may not have noticed that the logo for coffee scene is an actual physical thing in the world, we decided to do this instead of superimposing it imp post because we felt like this saved a lot of time we also had more it was easier to plac it and it'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 inframe 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 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 whole this thing here conation wise it doesn't make much sense, but the shot is like really nice, you know and, yeah it's really important to for us to like get the composition down because like in the Heat of the Moment you're not going to like 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 the Pioneer going oh my little tummy, and then we have this closeup of the pioneer going like that and then we switch back and the Pioneer like looks around and obviously we have the shot where it's does the zoom in 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 to figure out and and you know they're kind of similar like they have the they don't have the exact same composition, but you know you get the point and especially this run cycling 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 little couple of Lights here and there to to make it, look nicer and you know add a little bit of, depth of field and that kind of stuff, to make it look nice once we finished all these shots and we have them ready, what we do is we just plug them into this like 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 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, 1.0 trailer was made in 60 FPS, because we wanted that to like actually look like the game and 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 ingame like that we're using in-game assets, it's not like a it is 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 build to have like no laoding for instance so like everything looks crisp in the background making sure that all animations run perfectly you know we might have humongous factories that are going to run perfectly smooth in 60 FPS when you render but maybe not on like the same machine and this is a little bit of like 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 all the Cinematic stuff, so it's a yeah it's a 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 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 like I mentioned before like all these animations that I'm playing right now, they've been created in Maya by our animator and then I created like the mockup 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 like this shot with the Pioneer running and all the stuff in the foreg and whatnot, and yeah this there's a lot going on in this shot, for this I've added like particles in the background so like when the Pioneer jumps over over the the thing for instance you can see the particles in the background fly off they're they look really nice with the bokeh here the depth of feel and it's there's like slow motion going on, and then like this this get like the particles from the hand playing here so you can you 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 Sprints animation here is 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, that was made with just the jump in and then I just like tweak it and time it into the Run sequence, in the sequencer as you can see so you can see see here like right how it weighs into, 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 so it's really easy to like tweak these things, in engine and like you know pin pinpoint animations and whatnot, and the same thing here like she's running and then we have a separate slide animation here so B Bally just time take like all these different animations and and just like take what I need and put them in the timeline and time them up and 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 like going off when you know it's building stuff but we needed a bit more we needed to juice it up a little bit more for the Traer so I added a ton of like these Sparks effects, that I made myself custom by the way, to like better high and like different angle so it shows up better in the shot, you you'd be surprised how much you need to cheat to make it look good and like for this shot here, I've added like VFX here to the right so you see like the little Sparks, 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, and like there's a spotlight on the Hub that also like emphasizes the exposure so I turn 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 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 like weird feeling where like things in the background becomes smaller so you see like these refineries in the background, and it's sort of a similar situation there like I had to build these refineries in such a specific location so that they would show up perfectly in frame, so- I legit had to set up this composition and then like build and move these factories around to make sure that when you get this Hitchcock effect that like they would move properly and and look weird and all that stuff, 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 the frame we have this other pioneer reacted to it dead p, fun fact this like running thing here that's from the blockout we didn't change that at all we F 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, 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 punch line 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, with everyone in the in the in the trailer Task Force Team, 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 blockout video and eventually you know our little temp video that we made with storyboards are replaced with you know shots that are in work work in progress and then eventually they're replaced by new shots and eventually you have a trailer and just like keep it iterating all these things, and eventually you 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 B 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 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, 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 down scales 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, 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, 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, and it was really clutch the final render for that shot was made it was finished on the same day as it released, 1.0 so, yeah it's oh boy clutch so for a lot of stuff that we make for the trailers