We are back, new and improved
Well here we are, more than 100 days into lock down and heading back to a new normal along with the rest of the country and the world. Across the board; personally, professionally, emotionally and financially this has been a super-tornado of bizarre-ness, and whether you’ve hated every moment of it, or found peace in the quieter moments, we are all starting to look ahead to the return to work.
The world is now irreversibly different, and we expect to see a lot of change in all areas of life. Here at Engine House we are ready to evolve. A bit of change does everyone good, especially off the back of a global pandemic.
Throughout the last few months we have been furloughed as part of the Job Retention Scheme, and have been chomping at the bit to get started again. It’s been a tough period since March, when the leads started drying up, projects were being postponed and we made the decision to start working from home, just ahead of the national lock down.
Whilst returning part-time to work, we have been putting in some hours to really get to grips with Unreal Engine, a game engine that is blowing the lid off the industry. We spotted this a few years ago, and were waiting for it to be ready to also use for animation and the time is finally right.
As a real-time renderer, the big, hot and super-powerful GPU render beast that filled up our office isn’t chugging away to compile the final frame. It happens in real time… meaning straight away. Forget hours of rendering times, checking in overnight to set off new renders and that heart sinking feeling of coming in the next morning to find your last render crashed.
Not only this, but Unreal allows for huge amounts more autonomy, flexibility and creativity - so far so good, and sounding very Engine House.
And, it just looks good.
A WIP still from a project inside Unreal Engine.
We’ve always prided ourselves as innovative and experimental, but now more than ever seems to be the time to fully embrace this. We are stripping right back and getting to the core of what makes us work well. We’ve always put creativity and efficiency first, and this tech really empowers us to do this.
For the last few years our business has been split into two - the service side where we work on a huge variety of projects for clients; and the Film & TV side, where we develop and produce our own content, resulting in a slate of creative projects.
Back From The Dead Red before and after
Both of these sides of our business will thrive under this new approach. It puts much more control in the hands of our clients, as well as giving us more autonomy over our own projects, whilst still keeping budgets low. If that wasn’t enough, it also is the perfect companion to remote working, allowing for users to access it from anywhere, and gives our clients the most direct remote interaction (including using an iPad as a remote camera!).
We will be releasing a series of blogs and videos to go into further detail on this, so keep your eyes peeled!
And so, like a phoenix from the ashes, we hope to return from our furlough break as a shiny new Engine House. Still the same lovable rogues, but with some new, sexy tech as part of our repertoire.
Meanwhile, the website has been given a face lift, so do have a look around and take a look at some of our projects, old and new. A family of singing croissant heads or a disease fighting robot, anyone? And if you have a project you’d like our help with, you know what to do.