Stanley Cup Spring Technical Breakdown
Introduction
It’s the best time of the year - each day is longer and warmer, the world is in bloom, and the Stanley Cup Playoffs are revving up. The palpable excitement of the tournament complements the change of the seasons and builds towards a thrilling crescendo that rings in the summer.
This was the inspiration for Stanley Cup Spring, as much an ode to the changing of the seasons and to the greatest prize in sports as an opportunity to explore the capabilities of Unreal Engine.
I set out to create cinematic renders that would utilize Unreal’s capacity for large scale, photorealistic environments with the aim of telling a story of a world in transformation and a prize ready to be won.
I began with a quick previz shot on my phone. Take a look at some examples of final versions compared with my initial visualizations below.
[COMPARISON GIFS HERE]
The first step in the Engine was to rough out the shots. This informed how I populated the environment, as I could place elements and landscape pieces with an idea of the final angles in mind.
Next I built the primary environment, decorating the landscape and populating the background with mountains and Megascans. Once I had a solid structure in place, I duplicated the original map into a winter and spring version so I could go about creating the two distinct scenes.
The real work was in creating the details that made each environment come to life, which I’ll break down in the below sections.
Once I had my final renders, I did some post-processing work, cut the footage and highlights to Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleurs,” and polished it off with some sound design.
Winter Scene
My priority for the winter environment was to create a feeling of dormancy, to be contrasted with a sense of awakening. I used some dead tree assets to decorate the island, and used Will Faucher’s EasySnow both for the falling snow and the snow collected on the megascan assets and the Cup itself.
Custom Ice Material
Achieving the right look for the icy sea was essential. It’s one of the most crucial visual contrasts between the two seasonal environments, and I needed it to look as interesting as the beautiful ocean blueprint.
I created a custom material to accomplish this, using a basic Unreal stone texture as both the surface texture and the normal map to create some unevenness and depth on the surface.
Still, I wanted to push the visual further. In nature, some light penetrates the surface of a sheet of ice and is reflected and refracted by subsequent layers. To emulate this, I created an illusion of depth by tracking the camera’s angle in relation to the surface of the ice and used that to create reflections that appear to come from beneath the surface.
The gifs below demonstrate this effect and show how I exposed the strength of the depth illusion as a parameter that can be changed within the material instance (I’ve also exaggerated the effect for the purposes of demonstration).
Freezing and Thawing
To communicate the idea that the Cup itself was awakening from wintertime dormancy, I needed to find a way to create an animatable frost layer on top of the Cup’s static mesh.
I created a custom blueprint to accomplish this, using the frozen lake material as a starting point for the art direction of the icy encasement.
Spring Scene
Building the spring scene was one of the most exciting parts of the process, as the image of the iconic Stanley Cup crowned in flowers was what inspired the entire project.
Decorating the Cup was first up. I used Unreal’s foliage painting tool and art directed the flowers to cover the entire front side and all of the flat surfaces of the trophy. I added a couple of trees to the top to create a little more height and contrast against the frozen version.
For the realistic ocean, I used Dylan Browne’s “Ocean System for Rendered Cinematics” blueprint and tweaked the settings to get just the right color and feel. I added some trees to the megascans decorating the space leading up to the Cup and incorporated some animated birds in flight to round out the springtime atmosphere.
NHL Flower Shield
In order to create the NHL logo out of flowers, I acquainted myself with Unreal’s Avalanche motion design tools. I put the flower meshes into a cloner and used a png file of the logo as a map for their placement. I messed with various settings until the shield looked as legible and filled in as possible with plenty of variety in the flowers.
I then made two renders of the final camera movement: one without and one with the flower logo. That way, I was able to simply fade one into the other and create an illusion that the flowers were appearing as the shot progressed.