For my first project at Telemundo I was tasked with teaching the real-time graphics team how to implement Unreal engine 5 into their workflow. Ramiro Dall'Agnese and I set off with the challenge of recreating Joe Biden's Oval Office 1:1 in both scale and detail. The graphic was to be used as a VR graphic with green screen to showcase the different elements of the Oval Office and how different presidents add and change things throughout its lifetime. This project went on for nearly a year off and on until finally it was used for the 2025 innaguration coverage on January 20th.
Role:
Technical Artist
Industry:
Broadcast Media
Duration:
23 weeks
Challenges
Performance: Ensuring the scene was performing at 120 FPS in all parts of the room by optimizing, baking lighting, and reducing texture sizes.
Realism: Toeing the line between performance and quality was a though battle but in the end both were properly balanced.
UV Layouts: UV layouts for complex meshes such as the Resolute Desk was super important. Unreal Engine uses meshes UVs to generate lightmaps for the lighting and shadows to be baked on so improper layouts would have artifacts.
My Approach
Brainstorming
Identifying: We first had to identify every little pieces and detail inside the Oval Office to know what to model and what went where.
Decide on Project Settings: Unreal Engine has two different workflows when it comes to lighting and global illumination. Lumens is UE's newest lighting system that is very expensive but ultra detailed. We opted for the more performance friendly version which was using GPU Lightmass to bake all the lighting into the objects' textures.
Design and Development
3D Modeling: Most of the meshes in the office were 3D modeled by hand in both Blender and Cinema 4D. The curtains and drapes however were modeled in a Virtual Reality modeling software called Gravity Sketch. Being in VR and using hand gestures made modeling soft bodies a breeze and gave it more of a human touch.
Materials & Texturing: A lot of the materials in the project were pulled from Unreal Engine's Quixel Bridge which gives users free access to a library of high-quality common materials such as wood, metal, plastic, etc. The one unique thing we did was use Midjourney AI to generate the texture that was wrapped around the lamps next to the couches since we couldn't find the exact art that's used.
Lighting: Lighting involved a long series of tests, trial, and error. The final baked scene only used about 3 or 4 lights with the light ring around the ceiling providing most of the global illumination we needed.
Testing and Optimizing
Studio Testing: To see how our scene would perform in real-time, we hooked it up through VizRT and tested the camera tracking in our Green Screen Studio. We then created a holout matte to allow the talent to walk behind objects like the sofas and desk which further increased the realism of the graphic.
Performance Optimization: If there were any parts of the room that made the graphic stutter or slow down we diagnosed the issue and fixed it on the spot to ensure a smooth and optimized graphic.
Conclusion
This project started off as a way for me to teach my team at Telemundo how to use Unreal Engine, but in the end I learned just as much as them. Recreating the Oval Office 1:1 was never going to be an easy task, but I am extremely happy with the end result and we really pushed the boundaries of real-time virtual production technology.
