Programming and
Design by
 
Jens Schöbel
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Unreal Confrontation

Unreal Confrontation is a matinee I made for the MSUC. I put all my effort and experience of the Unreal Editor into this project. It took over a year to create a first version from scratch. At this point the matinee was not complete, but anyway I was accepted as a phase four finalist of the contest.

After the response that I was in the finals I started to finish the movie. This took me quite some time. I think it must have been around five or six weeks till I received one of the longest mails I ever got:

Entered.

... I got informed by Jeff Moris and I only thought:

Brevity is the soul of wit. smile

The final version of the matinee contains a huge bunch of scripted sequences and a total of seven different sets where the story takes place. An eighth set was planned and built including the lighting, but this big hangar slowed my system totally down hence this set was cut out. In each of these sets I used different mapping techniques to create an overall gloomy dark feeling to show the futility of a war.

At this point I would like to apologize for the pictures being in such a low resolution. I only have a limited amount of webspace and so I want to keep the pictures small it size.

Press

A screenshot from my matinee was used as cover for a book about machinima. If you do not believe this check the following pictures. The left one is a photo of the book, the right one is a screenshot of my movie. Naturally, inside the book there can be found some more about my matinee. If you want to know more from machinima visit the linked homepages. And please buy the book. smile

MSUC Phase 4 finalist announcement
Grand Finals Finalist announcement
Machinima book at amazon.com
Machinima book at amazon.de
www.machinima.org
www.machinima.com

Storyline

2215
New Earth Government formed to battle Skaarj Empire.

2216
During the '7 Day Siege' the Skaarj surround Earth. In a bold move, NEG commandos destroy the Skaarj mother ship, causing the Skaarj to retreat in disarray.

THIS STORY ...
... takes place in the middle of outer space.

It's October 2215 and the last line of defense are five outposts close to the Skaarj border. These military bases are the last hope of modern civilization. Spies reported that the Skaarj are planning to destroy these bases. Marines and mercenaries are fighting alongside.

One of these mercenaries is Captain Jake T. Hartman. A lonely wolf for the entire life he now has to cooperate with the army. Tired of war there are only two alternatives - victory or death.

Pictures from the matinee

Actually there are a lot of pictures in this section. That's because my matinee contains a lot of different sets. The map file for UT2004 is about 78 MB in size. That's three times the size of an usual deathmatch map. Hence loading the map in the game will take a while. Here I'll show you the different sections of the movie in order of its appearance. Some of the places are visited multiple times.

Landing Base



Briefing Room




Jungle



Blue Room


Outpost




Storage Depot




Destroyed Computer Room




Making the Matinee

The following pictures aren't from the final version. The notations in this section show how the matinee evolved.


This is a small overview of the kind of my working. I always start with a standard texture and place only a very small number of static meshes. This is a good workflow if it comes to a point where I have to rearrange the brushes. If this is fine I start to place the static meshes and texturize the level. If this looks good I add the lights. I do it in the last step because the calculation of light takes a very long time. The complete lighting of the matinee took around twenty minutes. I decided to create a separate map for each set of the movie into one map. I finished these relatively small maps and finaly put them all together at the end. The problem with this approach were the scripts. But after all the movie works quite nice.

pictures taken during development
Phase 4 Final Pictures

Download

Follow the link to my old page and download the umod file in the files menu. You must have UT2004 installed in order to view the matinee.

old UTConfrontation page