Murder Drones

This credit refers to my main role at Glitch – developing tools and systems in Unreal Engine to automate, improve, or optimise workflow and pipeline. The team working on these projects used a number of my tools to assist with animation import, shot setup, and rendering, and there is a whole suite of other tools for more specific jobs and scenarios that helped make everyone’s work a lot easier.

Moving from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 presented a number of challenges including content migration, performance issues, and new technologies including Lumen and Nanite. This role refers to my work assisting in both the project upgrades and optimisations with the new features available in UE5. This included a full optimisation audit and report that educated other team members on what is heavier in Unreal Engine scenes, as well as some recommendations on how to optimise some of the workflows for different departments.

My attention to detail and planning in relation to crowd demonstrated in Meta Runner Season 3 proved that I was the right person to continue the responsibility of crowd implementation in Murder Drones. As the Crowd Technical Artist, my role was to ensure the crowd members were consistent and correct throughout the season between shots and episodes, as well as setting up background crowd with provided animations, including planning, randomising, and implementing the characters. The best example of this is in Episode 3 during the prom scene where I coordinated 50+ different background characters, making sure they were all consistent between shots, with some telling little stories of their own. There are also recurring crowd members between episodes who can be seen doing different things relating to their personalities each episode.

During production of Murder Drones, I also had the big task of IT Technician in the background, where I was responsible for the hardware and systems used daily by Glitch Productions. As Glitch expended and employed more and more remote workers across the globe, the biggest challenge faced was making everything fast and efficient. A lot of work was put into migrating data from physical to cloud-based solutions, and refining data flow and pipeline practices to account for people working on projects in various parts of the world. In between episodes 6 and 7 (while The Amazing Digital Circus pilot was in production), Glitch Productions also upgraded to a bigger office, which gave me the job of coordinating the setup and implementation of IT solutions for the new building. This included workstation and server setups, internet connection, meeting room setups, and moving equipment with as minimal interruption to the rest of the team as possible.

This credit refers to my main role at the company as a UE4 Tool Developer. A lot of the tools that were used in this show were tools that I’d set up during previous projects, or iterations on previous tools. However, there were also new tools created specifically involving systems such as LOD generation, optimisations, and small things to improve the overall cinematic render pipeline.

Most of the destruction physics throughout the Murder Drones pilot were my VFX. I spent some time earlier on in this project learning the basics of fracture simulations in Houdini and the process of importing them into UE4 as animations.

Another new experience for me on this project was learning about both Niagara and Cascade particle effects. I certainly wouldn’t call myself an expert at particle effects but this project gave me a great chance to play around with these systems and come up with some good-looking end results.

This role involved assisting in the various Post-Production aspects of developing the series. A large portion of this was implementing Quality Assurance fixes to the final Level Sequences in UE4, implementing missing VFX and reimporting animations.