Building the Future: Using Unreal Engine to Create a Sci-Fi City for a Planetarium Show

At the end of 2024, our friends at SubVRsive approached us with an exciting challenge: creating a video experience for a major pharmaceutical company designed to be viewed inside a planetarium. The concept? A journey into the future. To bring this vision to life, we built an expansive, panoramic cityscape in Unreal Engine, utilizing futuristic skyscrapers, glowing neon, and a vibrant, bustling atmosphere featuring spaceships. Then, we had to “teleport” the three pre-recorded hosts of the event into this digital world and customize the finished project to accommodate one of the biggest screens on which our work has ever been shown. Here’s how we made it all happen.

The first step in bringing this futuristic world to life was constructing the cityscape itself. We began by carefully curating a collection of 3D city assets that aligned with our vision of a high-tech metropolis. These elements were then imported into Unreal Engine, a powerful 3D graphics development tool best known for its use in video game creation, but equally capable of crafting cinematic virtual environments.

We painstakingly placed and arranged assets to create a realistic cityscape and then fine-tuned the lighting, ensuring the city had the right balance of atmospheric glow, dramatic shadows, and reflections. Camera placement was another crucial aspect—we tested different angles to find the most visually compelling compositions that would work seamlessly within the planetarium’s immersive dome.

With the environment set, our next challenge was anticipating how the pre-recorded hosts would fit within the scene. To test this, we placed an image on a plane within Unreal Engine, allowing us to experiment with their positioning and ensure they would blend naturally with the digital surroundings.

To bring some additional life to the cityscape, we introduced spaceships soaring through the skyline. After selecting spaceship assets, we fine-tuned their lighting and textures—both to ensure they blended naturally with the environment and to optimize them for efficient rendering. Each ship’s engine got its own rocket booster flame particle effect, not only making them more visible against the night sky but also adding a motion trail that enhanced the sense of speed and movement. We then carefully animated the ships, varying their height, distance from the camera, and speed, simulating a dynamic flow of aerial traffic.

Throughout this process, optimization for rendering—the process of generating the final image outside of the engine—was always top of mind. In this case, we rendered each spaceship separately and composited them into the final city render loop instead of rendering the entire scene at once. While this added a few hours in post-production, it saved us 20 – 50 hours of rendering time, allowing us to turn around the project for the client much faster to accommodate a tight schedule.

With our futuristic cityscape fully realized, it was time to officially introduce the stars of the show—the event’s hosts. Dressed in sci-fi-inspired attire, the three speakers had been pre-recorded in front of a green screen in 8K, delivering their welcome to the planetarium audience. To composite them into the space, we carefully keyed out the green screen, ensuring a clean removal of the background, and then rotoscoped the hosts into our city. This process allowed us to place them naturally within the environment.

Once all of our assets were in the cityscape, it was time to adapt the visuals for the unique format of the planetarium dome. To achieve this, we spherized the entire image sequence, ensuring that once projected, the scene would wrap correctly around the dome, creating an immersive, panoramic experience that transported the event’s audience straight into the future. Altogether, the final project came in at a whopping 15360 x 7680 pixels; even with our varied attempts to optimize each piece for rendering, it took over a day to render fully.

While we’re no strangers to Unreal Engine and cutting-edge video production technology—including Virtual Reality (VR)—this project presented a unique and exciting challenge. Crafting an immersive, futuristic world at such a grand scale pushed our creativity and technical expertise in new ways. And not every video production company gets to say they’ve designed content for a planetarium! A huge thank you to SubVRsive for trusting us with yet another incredible project. We can’t wait to see what we create together next!