Creating a King Tut Documentary with Unreal Engine

Let’s get rolling with another edition of VP Land. Got an awesome interview for you today.

In this issue:

🛕 Interview: Making a King Tut Doc in Unreal
🧚‍♀️ Alibaba launches tool to make digital humans
🛍️ Augmented reality shopping gets tested in California

and more! Let’s dive in.

MAIN STAGE

Unreal Documentary Filmmaking

A few weeks ago, Bad Decisions Studio released a really awesome short documentary on King Tut, featuring a photorealistic tour of his tomb, narrated by a female character.

It got a lot of attention online. Epic Games just featured it in their weekly spotlight.

The twist – the entire documentary was created in Unreal Engine. The creators never stepped foot in Egypt.

Unreal and virtual production has gone from building sci-fi worlds to backdrops for contemporary sets to now recreating historical scenes with photorealism for documentaries.

It’s like the Ken Burns effect on steroids.

We interviewed the team to get some insight on how a 3 person crew put this film together.

Building the tomb

• Everything within the tomb besides the death mask, which was created using photogrammetry, was modeled in Blender from scratch by looking at photos and videos.

• Then, they were textured in Substance Painter and then moved to the environment in Unreal Engine.

• For the exterior, some were megascan assets from Epic Games and some were modeled.

Creating the narrator

• The MetaHuman is just the narrator of the documentary and has no link to any historical figure.

• We created that MetaHuman ourselves based on our friend. It was acted and voiced by us and the voice was changed to a female voice using AI.

• She was animated using the MetaHuman Animator.

Putting it all together

• Everything was first rendered from Unreal Engine 5, then it was composited, color graded, and edited in Davinci Resolve.

• The voice of the narrator was altered using Resemble AI.

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VIDEO VILLAGE

Aputure dropped an intro video to VP

AKS

🌐 Around the Web

• Apple may be bringing spatial computing (using your hands) to more devices, like Apple TV and Watch, according to a patent filed.

• ARway.ai launches a pilot program for augmented reality shopping in one of California’s largest malls.

• Upload large files and folders fast with MASV*

• Alibaba Cloud debuts Live Portrait, a digital human video creation tool

• OpenAI acquires startup that has been “leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences,” established by former Instagram and Facebook workers

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CALL SHEET

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