Imagine

Spirited Away Train - Reimagined

Spirited Away is one of the most iconic animated films of all times, this is a homage to one of the well recognised scene in the film. 

This project was originally developed in Unity then ported into a custom Unreal Engine 4 build and now has been enhanced further in Unreal Engine 5.

This project was developed in a custom built version of Unreal Engine 4 that enables Nvidia DLSS 2.0 code to work. It was used to improve real-time performance and increase clarity as it replaced the default temporal anti-aliasing which produces smearing. 

During this time of development, two shaders were created to give the project a hand-drawn and stylised look. The outline shader uses camera depth which makes distant object have thinner lines and nearer objects thicker lines to give a better illusion of depth. Then the hatching shader is developed by using ray-tracing to determine the position and strength of the hatching texture.

When ported over to Unreal Engine 5, Nvidia DLSS is not yet supported, Epic Games' Temporal Super Resolution is used instead with similar quality and performance (4K output, 50% scaled). It has been upgraded with 'Nanite Virtualised Geometry' which is a new internal mesh format and rendering technology to render pixel scale detail and high-poly objects. In this case, it is used to enable better LOD transition which improved performance.

Origin - Animal Logic Academy Short Project

In the second semester at Animal Logic Academy, the team were split into smaller groups to create an interactive project. Origin (codename: Goldberg) was a third person platformer augmented reality mock-up developed in Unreal Engine 4, created in 3 weeks.

I was responsible for the programming, texturing , shaders and retopologizing of assets. 

The environment concept art was originally sculpted in ZBrush by Louis Green. When time came into production, the high-poly sculpted assets were then retopologised then baked as normal/height maps and textured in Substance Painter.

Origin was ported into Unreal Engine 5 for this entry.

Every material uses the same generated smart material to give consistency to the environment's look. In Unreal Engine 4, real-time raytracing were used to increase fidelity while also implementing Nvidia DLSS for performance. This project was recently into Unreal Engine 5 and used Temporal Super Resolution was used instead. Due to the retopologised meshes, Nanite is not necessary.

As a side project, I changed the shader to  a stylised look similar to Valkyrie Chronicles using the same outline and raytraced hatching shader from Spirited Away with some modification for a flipbook sketch look. 

Team Credit:

Robbie Beresford

Rey La Torre

Rosa Ling

Louis Green

Semisi Lotulelei

Fuad Soudah

AstroBot and AstroMat

AstroBot was an entry in The Rookies' Substance Texturing Challenge 2020. It entered the Finalist status and earned the Excellence award. The main concept of AstroBot is a companion to AstroMat, which was another competition hosted by Adobe Allegorithmic in early 2020.

Link: https://www.therookies.co/entries/8540 

AstroMat was an entry to Adobe's Meet MAT 2 contest in early 2020. It is the prequel to AstroBot and it finished in the runner-up place in the students category.

Link: https://www.therookies.co/projects/15569

Showreel

The showreel after completing Animal Logic Academy.