Garena’s Free Fire is one of the world’s most downloaded games, and to launch their new identity Fin’s global team produced four solo performances and one massive anthem performance pushing Unreal Engine to the limits with remarkable real-time 3D animation.

Award-winning music video director, James Chappel alongside Fin’s VFX Director Segundo Fernandez took the helm to bring this very ambitious, fully animated project to life. Unique directing techniques and innovative production workflows utelising a suite of different software were created, with Unreal Engine at the core of everything.

Both sourced and existing game IP environments were fed into Unreal and laid out for initial previsualization. This allowed for real-time experimentation of dynamic camera movements, environmental lighting, and sourcing the ideal location to showcase the character’s performance.

Fin was also tasked with breathing life into Free Fire’s original IP characters and props through rigging, clothing simulations, and animation with assets being required to be modeled and textured from scratch. Once motion capture and facial data were applied, the character’s energetic performance really took form.

For selected scenes, like the submarine destruction, simulations were produced outside of Unreal using Houdini and either pulled into Unreal or later composited over rendered plates from the engine.