Project Involvement Timeline

I wasn't the assigned Show Programmer for Battle at the Ministry, but I got asked to use my Unreal Engine expertise to support several efforts.

Back in 2021, Lee Wilson and I were asked to build a VR version of the ride in Unreal so that Creative Director Kim Gritzer could validate sight lines and see the show media at scale. We had to optimize all of the show assets to ensure we could run at a usable frame-rate in the Meta Quest Headsets. We built custom playback and pipeline tools that enabled us to share a Perforce project with our media partners.

In addition to the ongoing Tech Vis support, I also built a virtual production setup that enabled real-time compositing of live actors on a green screen onto our full scale media mock up. This let the project team validate character scale choices and determine how many folks should populate each lift.

To validate that the illusion of motion would work in the lift scenes, I built a scale model and mapped it in TouchDesigner. We 3D printed a show lift and a ride vehicle without a back wall so we could get a better sense of how the media motion would feel in each scene.

The attraction opened with Universal Epic Universe in Orlando in May 2025.