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Kite

A young boy tries to recapture an errant kite as he travels through a diverse and beautiful landscape which is being generated in real-time in our Unreal Engine at 30fps. Everything you see is not pre-rendered, it is generated on the fly in a landscape that measures 100 square miles.

The world is generated from a height-map from a region of the Isle of Skye. It has proceduraly placed rocks, grass, plants, trees, deer and birds. While it is dressed to camera the assets used are the same assets that are everywhere else in the map. The time of day is complete controllable. The wind is a simulation. The deer roam across the landscape using a terrain following A.I.

It features:

High-quality Motion Blur.
High-quality near and far Depth of Field.
Interactive time of day.
Full scene HDR reflections.
Temporal Anti-Aliasing.
Distance Field Ambient Occlusion.
Ray-Traced Distance Field Soft Shadows.
Dynamic Global Illumination from Heightfields.
Subsurface Scattering.
Two-Sided Foliage Shading Model.
Reactive A.I.
Procedural Vegetation and Rocks.
Material-Driven Grass Placement.
Facial Rig with 600+ Blendshapes.

All being generated in real-time at 30fps.

  • Gavin Moran
    Director
    Animator on Stuart Little 2, Open Season, Surf's Up, G-Force..
  • Kim Libreri
    Producer
    VFX Supervisor on The Matrix Trilogy
  • Project Type:
    Animation
  • Runtime:
    2 minutes 20 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    February 28, 2015
  • Production Budget:
    1 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    New Zealand
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Gavin Moran

Gavin Moran is a 20 year Feature Animation and VFX industry veteran. Originally born in Dublin, Ireland he moved to Los Angeles in the early nineties after completing two years of college at the Dun Laoghaire IADT studying traditional 2D animation. He initially worked in 2D but within a few year switched to the growing field of CG animation. Over the next 15 years worked for such companies as Walt Disney Feature Animation, Dreamworks SKG and Sony Pictures Imageworks animating on films such as Shark Tale, Surf’s Up, Open Season, Spiderman 2, Alice in Wonderland and Stuart Little 2 and was an Animation Supervisor on G-Force before leaving in 2010 to take a job with Epic Games in Cary, NC. Since then he has worked on engine demonstrations to show off the power of their popular Unreal Game Engine.

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Director Statement

Epic Games set out to make a short film which to all intensive purposes looks like a high-end pre-rendered CG short film EXCEPT to have it be rendered on the fly in real-time at 30fps in our popular Unreal Engine which is used primarily for the development of video games. We also wanted to leverage the short around a further demonstration of tech which was a 100 square mile landscape with procedural flora and fauna as well as many high end rendering effects. This is what we achieved.