Fangenuity is a wonderful thing, and the ways of expressing love for the saga has progressed in recent years, to the point where fans can recreate to stunning effect scenes from the original movie using modern VFX techniques. In no way a criticism of the work done before, these versions recreate much-loved moments using up-to-date and off-the-shelf packages to show what these scenes could look like were they done today (or as near as one could hope without the magic of ILM at hand).

Here, Cinematic Captures recreate the Battle Droid arrival at the Battle of Naboo using Unreal 5, and describe just how difficult that task is even 23 years removed from the release of The Phantom Menace.

I totally agree that the original looks more realistic, in fact a lot of it actually was real! They used footage of real grass, filmed the tanks using miniatures & had an insanely talented team of professionals from ILM (one of the best VFX companies in the world) working on it! At the time this was completely revolutionary and still totally holds up today!

The purpose of this vid was simply a personal exercise to try refine my skills and learn new techniques. I thought it could be interesting to try see if two people could remake this scene on a home computers using today’s technology and figured other people may be interested in seeing the results.

I actually struggled a lot with the grass and lighting on this one. I really wanted to try get the grass interacting with the AAT’s in the 2nd shot, but unfortunately I ran into quite a few technical issues I couldn’t solve with the raytraced shadows. I also couldn’t quite get the scale correct due to limitations with the grass density. In a few shots I had 500k grass mesh instances on screen so performance was rough and I wasn’t able to polish the scene as much as I would have liked. I’m sure there’s better ways to go about this, but unfortunately I’m still rather new to unreal engine.

I will certainly take in any criticism and try to do better in the future!