CGI environments for Le Roi Soleil, the 20th-anniversary revival of the legendary French musical produced by Dove Attia and directed by Kamel Ouali.

Six scenes built in Unreal Engine 5 and rendered for integration into the show's media servers, projected as digital extensions of the stage.

Created with Studio A+E, premiering at the Dôme de Paris in December 2025 before touring France, Switzerland, and Belgium throughout 2026.

The brief

Le Roi Soleil returned in 2025 for its twentieth anniversary — the same Dove Attia production, the same Kamel Ouali direction, with Emmanuel Moire reprising Louis XIV. But the staging needed to feel current.

Where the 2005 production relied on physical sets, this revival was built around large-format video screens woven into the stage architecture — used as living, dynamic extensions of the physical world the dancers move through.

I joined Studio A+E as the Unreal Artist responsible for translating their art direction into six full virtual scenes — architectures and environments that sit behind, around, and beside the performers. Each scene is a complete world: a place the production can light, populate, and inhabit for several minutes at a time.

My craft on the project covered everything from layout and animation through to lighting, look-development and final rendering. The art direction came from Studio A+E; the worldbuilding and technical realisation lived in Unreal Engine 5. Final outputs were rendered at high resolution through Unreal's Movie Render Queue and delivered to the production's media servers for integration into the live show.

The approach

Building for stage projection is its own discipline. The visuals had to read clearly from the back of a 4,000-seat venue while sitting in dialogue with live lighting, choreography, and music — never overpowering the performance, always supporting it. Working in Unreal Engine 5 made the iteration loop with Studio A+E faster and more flexible than a traditional offline pipeline would have allowed: scenes could be lit, restaged, and refined dynamically before being committed to final render. The Movie Render Queue pipeline gave us the production-grade reliability needed for a touring show, with the visual quality of high-end offline CGI.

Six immersive environments now travel with the production across France, Switzerland, and Belgium throughout the 2026 tour, before returning to the Dôme de Paris in autumn 2026. The show plays to packed houses; the visuals are, by the design of the production, an integral part of the new staging.