"Need For Speed High Stakes REMASTERED 2022" Unreal Engine 5 animation
Hi! 👋 This is a project overview of my first major 3D animation project - Need For Speed: High Stakes REMASTERED. I wanted to give everything I've currently learned about 3D and animation a try with a real life scenario so I decided to recreate the CGI intro cutscene from the 1999 game "Need For Speed: High Stakes" by Electronic Arts Canada/Seattle. I started out by making a shotlist in Notion and split up the scenes intro four different parts based on levels I had to build. Scene 1-4.
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I spent the majority of the time modeling the five cars in Blender which were the main actors in this video. I used lots of references, both from real world photographs as well as the ones from in-game. This process took about 4 months as I was relatively new still at modeling. After modeling was done I textured them in Substance Painter. I tried to optimize them by using as few materials as possible, using 4K textures for side panels which needed stickers (such as the police sign) and smaller res textures 1024x1024 and 2048x2048 for parts that had none to little details.
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The rest of the assets seen in the video is a mixture of Quixel assets, Sketchfab freebies, some mine (such as the train crossing sign, traffic lights and signs) and the amazing Bell 206 Police Interceptor helicopter was modeled and textured by https://www.artstation.com/p3ll1sh.
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In order to animate the cars I had the choice of animating in Blender and then importing the animations, however I decided I wanted to do everything in engine so came up with a control rig for the cars. This was very difficult as there were no guides online how to rig a car for animation in UE - only characters by rigging using blueprints for gaming. I experimented until I finally got a working control rig for one of the cars. I then duplicated this onto the other ones.
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For VFX I wanted to do everything with Niagara, but unfortunately didn't have the time to learn creating various simulations so due to internal deadline I resorted to using 2D planes, imported as image sequences and played as media tracks in the sequencer.
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Rendering and lighting was done using Lumen and raytraced reflections and translucency.
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After all the shots were rendered I edited everything together in DaVinci Resolve 17. However I didn't want to use EAs soundtrack so I recreated the entire soundscape, engine sounds came from recordings of NFS Heat (their latest NFS game) and other sounds are mostly from Freesounds.org.
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All in all, this project was extremely fun to do, I learned so much and from start to finish it took me roughly 6 months give or take.
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Thanks for watching!
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✉️ Feel free to contact me with questions:
michael@tiedtke.se
+46 070 47 17 547
Best, Michael
The final rendered animation video.
Layout and Unlit - First blockout of animations.
I built 4 levels in UE5, small sections of the map where each portions of animations were played out i.e. beginning, middle and end.
Model of a Porsche 911 993 GT2, created in Blender 3.1 and textured using Substance Painter 3D.
Model of a Lamborghini Diablo SV, created in Blender 3.1 and textured using Substance Painter 3D.
Model of a Chevrolet Corvette C5, created in Blender 3.1 and textured using Substance Painter 3D.
Model of a Chevrolet Caprice Pursuit Cop Car, created in Blender 3.1 and textured using Substance Painter 3D.
Model of a Honda Civic, based on a modified Sketchfab model, recreated in Blender 3.1 and textured using Substance Painter 3D.
Overview of the shotlist based on the original intro video by EA Seattle/EA Canada.
2D cards of VFX used in the animation. Imported as img sequences into UE5 and edited using sequencer and media tracks.
I created a control rig from scratch which I learned by experimenting. In the control rig you can in the sequencer animate the front wheels, the rear wheels and the suspension i.e. body mesh separate from each other with 3 easy to use controllers.
I discovered a trick to blend the asphalt with the ground by using the DitherTemporalAA node in the material properties.
All the car models I used in the animation inside of UE5.
All the car models I used in the animation inside of UE5.
All the car models I used in the animation inside of UE5.
The original CG intro cutscene created by Electronic Arts Seattle/EA Canada.
Wireframe of one of the car models.
I made a tutorial over on Youtube how to create a control rig for cars in UE5 for animation using sequencer.