After 13 years of working in traditional 3D animation, Sava Zivkovic explores the real-time motion and lighting possibilities of Unreal Engine in his latest personal project, a dark psychological trip called “Irradiation”. Sava says: “Irradiation is a passion project done in my free time when I’m not working on client projects at Axis Studios mand it marks the first time I’ve used Unreal Engine for a project like this, and the experience is best described as… well, absolutely unreal. The challenges we faced were more technical rather than creative. I had a nine-minute performance-driven full CGI short on my hands with photoreal-ish digital humans, and digital faces are always hard to do, especially on micro budgets. Luckily the character design and the setting of the film meant that we’re going to be seeing the faces obscured by masks for the most part, which was a lifesaver on this production.”