First we planned the framework of the job in close collaboration with the client. We then proceeded with a storyboard and a technical breakdown of the requirement of the job. The initial steps of the process was important to be able to estimate the time each step would take for us to be able to deliver the first render within three days.
The plans and layout of the forest was sketched in photoshop and this gave an overview of the different shots and made sure that there was vavarity and interest in each cut and camera move.
The setup was quite simple in Unity, the time consuming part was to place the many thousand assets and make sure that the scenes didn’t become too heavy to work with. Here the planning phase was crucial as only the parts visible to the view of the camera had to be build, keeping the scene sizes at a reasonable level.
We utilized Unity 2018.4.10f1 LTS edition as this is in our opinion the most stable version at the moment and we couldn’t afford any setbacks. There were definitely visual improvements to be had in the HDR-pipeline in newer versions of Unity, but at the moment they didn’t support SpeedTree assets, so it wouldn’t be a viable solution.
Once all the scenes where setup, we used Cinemachine and Unity’s built in render to take out 4K still images to be composited in After Effects. At the moment there is no real solutions to take out renderpasses, but it is definitely something we are hoping will be a feature soon.