Footage was the pitch.
A development team was building a vertical slice to pitch a major licensed fantasy IP to its rights holder. The pitch depended on high-quality cinematic footage rendered out of Unreal Engine 5, and the team couldn't reliably capture or export it. Their deadline was the end of the year.
FX Chamber, the VFX outsourcing studio supporting the project, identified the problem and brought me in to solve it.
Not a capture bug.
A few minutes into my first call with the team, it was clear this wasn't one broken setting in the render pipeline. The failures pointed at level structure, gameplay code, lighting, and content, and nobody on the team had a view across all of those.
I laid out what I was seeing and made the case that the problem needed someone who could work across the whole project. They agreed.
One visible failure. Six separate causes. Nobody owned any of them.
What was actually wrong.
- One level doing far too much.Too much of the project had been built into a single level file, which made problems hard to isolate and every change risky.
- Game mode vs. cinematics.The project's game mode was overriding Sequencer's camera selection, so the renderer wasn't always capturing the shot that had been set up.
- Lights buried in Blueprints.Lights nested inside Blueprint actors were effectively invisible to the people lighting shots, which caused lighting that appeared incorrectly in captured frames.
- Content hidden from the renderer.Objects failed to render at all, terrain didn't render correctly, and captured frames flickered.
- Presentation settings.Post-process settings and lighting profiles weren't tuned for final-quality cinematic output.
- No ownership.Every issue sat between two disciplines, so each one was waiting on someone else. That was the reason none of the others had been fixed.
Hands-on, and with the team.
I diagnosed each issue hands-on in the project and fixed the rendering problems directly: the flickering, the objects hidden from the renderer, the incorrect lights, and the post-process and lighting profiles.
On the people side, I got individual contributors to take ownership of the issues in their areas and guided them to the solutions, so the fixes stuck.
I then rendered out all of the final video myself, making content fixes along the way to improve the results. I built render presets that captured as fast as possible without losing quality, and left them with the team so they could render new material themselves after I'd gone.
Delivered before the deadline.
Every rendering issue was resolved, and all of the pitch footage was delivered before the team's end-of-year deadline. The team also kept a capture pipeline they can run without outside help.
Working with Dan was an excellent experience. He seamlessly integrated into production, providing thoughtful and insightful solutions that proactively solved problems. His attention to detail, communication and visibility made a difference in the daily development which made closing out the work predictable and reliable.