Director Will Adams and the animation/VFX team at Goodbye Kansas dig into Unreal Engine 5 (complemented by Maya and Houdini) to create this trailer for F1 Manager 2022, the racing management simulation game from Frontier Development.

CG supervisor Henrik Melsom at Goodbye Kansas in Stockholm: “We were particularly interested in trying Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen (for lighting and reflections) and Nanite (for virtualized geometry) systems. Lumen served us really well, particularly for the shots with an LED wall behind the car.

“The fast pace of production, an ambitious director, and also having to train some team members who were less experienced with Unreal Engine. The obstacles pushed us to be creative in our skillset, our approach, and our storytelling.

“The car in the trailer has a very specific-looking iridescent paint, which has an optical component called diffraction grafting, that went through many iterations.

“We tried taking a physical approach at first, where we would approximate the diffraction grafting. In the end, what worked better was taking it outside of reality by decoupling it from the lighting. This allowed us to control the iridescent highlights separately, leaving it as something we could control on a per-shot basis independent from other lighting.

“Other than Unreal Engine 5, the team made use of Maya for some rigging and Houdini for pre-processing some meshes. Also, we always use Perforce for version control on Unreal Engine projects.”
 

 
Client: Frontier Development

Production: Goodbye Kansas
Director: Will Adams
Art Director: Michael Rigley
CG Supervisor: Henrik Melsom, Tim Hermes
Executive Producer: Anton Söderhäll
Producer: Thomas Oger
Coordinator: Josefine Jakobsson
Props Modeling/Lookdev: Роман Тихонов
Rigging artist: Jakob Vaknin
Animaton Keyframe: Jakob Vaknin
Realtime Lead: Henrik Melsom
Realtime artists: Herman Fredlund, Jakob Vaknin, Mica Olsson
Concept Art: Till-Valentin Holder
Motion Graphics: Will Adams, Marcus Melin, Michael Rigley
Compositing: Max Wester
VFX Editor/Grading: Jimmy Zhu

Sound design: Jamie Lewis / Frontier
VO: Alec Newman