Unreal Engine Virtual Scouting Tools

What is virtual scouting?

Virtual scouting in Unreal Engine is a VR toolset packaged with every version of the engine after 4.23 allowing film productions to intuitively plan, iterate, and even shoot CG scenes that would otherwise be extremely difficult to do with the use of traditional monitors. This empowers directors, cinematographers, and other production creatives to take the vision they have and create it as they would with a real-action film; by actually manipulating objects, camera framing, camera properties, animations, lighting, and much more; all in real-time. Through the use of multi-user, other members of the crew can also join alongside the director to assist in iterating even faster on the vision, ultimately speeding up production, improving communication, and saving money.

My Role

I worked extensively on not only prototyping the front-end UI/UX of the Virtual Production Toolset within the engine, but I also coordinated directly with Epic Games' Lead Designers and Product Managers to fully integrate said prototypes into the engine's main branch itself; which has ended up being accessible to a userbase of over 6 million people.

This included 3D asset creation/editing workflows for controllers, props, spatial interfaces, as well as 2D UI element creation, UMG animations, dynamic UMG widgets, and a comprehensive use of blueprint scripting systems to bring it all together into a cohesive package. Just about anything that the user sees, hears, or interacts with I played a key role in creating and implementing into the engine plugin.​Since its release there have been numerous large scale movie and TV productions that have made extensive use of its functionality to enhance both pre-production and production of the respective projects.

Documentation

Below you'll find a link to Unreal Engine's official documentation that details everything about the Virtual Scouting toolset and how to use it:

Documentation