My inspiration for this was the original Alien movie from 1979. Remember the scenes on the Nostromo where the crew was seated at their console? You could see the graphics from their monitors projected onto their faces. Not realistic at all of course but quite a cool feel to it even after all these years.

This project brings several things together. The character I’ve done a good amount of work on. The default metahuman materials are a wonderful starting point but I have made some adjustments to bring things to life a bit more. Skin specular and sub-surface adjustments, the eyes and hair have had adjustments too. The textures for the skin are a matched set of 8k images that give wonderful detail and realism.

The texture projection is achieved by a multi-light setup controlled through a blueprint that allows for control of the chromatic spread, the light’s cone angles and various attributes. Unreal allows only a monochromatic texture on the light. If you want the RGB it will require 3 lights one for each channel. Hope this might be something that will be updated at some point down the road. There’s another blueprint for controlling the playback of the video file used in the texture for the lights. Auto start and playback, looping, etc.

The main scene lights are using hdr images to help vary the shape and tone of the light as well as the shape of the specular highlights you see in the eyes. It all helps to remove a bit of that cg curse so often seen in other renders.