Falling in Reverse, Prologue Study.

When Falling in Reverse released the music video for their single Prologue, I was immediately captivated by its striking visuals. At the time, I was exploring techniques in Unreal Engine for creating massive animated crowds while maintaining optimized performance. The video quickly became a key source of inspiration, offering valuable insight into balancing scale and detail in complex scenes.

I studied references from the music video and bts footage to analyze costumes, lighting, and camera work.

Using PureRef, I chose a key scene to recreate in Unreal Engine,

focusing on its atmosphere and intricate visual details.

Collection of reference images used to recreate the Unreal Engine study of Falling in Reverse’s Prologue music video, including royal guard helmets, post-modern buildings, and the original scene visuals

The entire environment was built using assets from Kitbash3D, which proved to be a huge time-saver without sacrificing quality. For lighting and atmosphere, I combined Ultra Dynamic Sky with William Faucher’s EasyFog enhanced with custom smoke textures, aiming for a subtle, industrial post-modern look.

Unreal Engine study showing the environment modeling without characters, featuring an empty square illuminated by spotlights and surrounded by post-modern factories and brutalist architecture, with atmospheric smoke and fog in the distance

I use PCG (Procedural Content Generation) to build the army with Mixamo models, leveraging Trash Praxis’ tool to convert skeletal meshes into static meshes with animations baked into their materials. This smart approach creates realistic crowds while keeping the poly count remarkably low.

Close-up Unreal Engine render showing the PCG-generated army of knights with swords and shields, created for the Falling in Reverse Prologue music video study

For the main characters, I used the Fab Paragon: Kallari model, modifying it by removing the hood and reducing the head size.

I modeled the helmet in Cinema 4D and attached it to each skeleton

so it tracked the animation properly.

Textured 3D model from Fab Unreal Marketplace used as the guard character in my Unreal Engine study inspired by Falling in Reverse’s Prologue music video

I used just two Mixamo animation tracks. The walk cycle drove all the main characters moving through the frame, with each instance offset to give them their own pace. The distant army relied on the idle animation, with random start times per character to keep the motion organic. In the end, those background loops are barely noticeable,

but I like to think you can still feel them.

Unreal Engine project screengrab in wireframe view, showing the environment modeling and layout for my study inspired by Falling in Reverse’s Prologue music video

Everything was rendered and exported directly from Lumen.

For someone used to polishing everything in post,

this was a mind-blowing experience.

To wrap it up, here’s a making-of covering the entire process.

back to work