From Ice to the Void

Dark Nebula

Unreal Engine 5 Short movie

This is my most recent project I created during my studies in RealTime and Virtual Production. The main focus was creating a compeling story driven by a digital human main character and its jorney throughout a dark and hostile SciFi environment inspired in the Alien screenplay (Ridley Scott 1979).

From concept, script and direction to world building, animation and shoting its been a very challenging experience that empowered my passion to create my first short movie for the last 4 months using Unreal Engine 5.

Animation Breakdown

Sarah, the main character, was made from Metahumans and the body of a Paragon character from Epic's free content. The face is driven by facial motion capture but since I didn't have access to a mocap body suit I decided to use some base premade animations for the body. In order to further tweek and acommodate them to the original acting performance, I created a custom control rig inside Unreal Engine in order to contain all the production pipeline within the same software.
The alien model and the control rig were made by Aaron Sims Creative and given for free in the Epic Marketplace, I did use some base animations and created new ones for the film.
The following video will show a bit of the process:

Light Breakdown

Custom Models

The following pictures show the main custom models I created for the film.

To finalize the first part, I'd like to thank the small team that made this production possible.

Alex Carratala Arce (Production Assistant, Sound Design & Music)

Gabriela Caldere Garcia (as Dr. Sarah Louise)

Pau Meléndez Llorens (Music, Voice Acting as Cptn Kein)

The Frozen Lands

Unreal Engine 4 Cinematic

This cinematic was my first approach to world building and cinematography when I started learning Real Time and Unreal Engine workflows. The main focus was the composition, lighting and the cinematic approach always having in mind fantasy world references from the game and cinema industry. I wanted to combine realism and stylized art direction to give more personality by combining my own assets and quixel megascans.
The last shot was inspired by this amazing concept art from Arthur Yuan.

Breakdown

The landscape generation was made in Gaea together with some basic texturing, for the cloth simulation I decided to bake it in Marvelous Designer and import it in Unreal to avoid different simulations on each capture. The gate base model was created in Maya, then Zbrush for details and texturing in Substance Painter. For creating the Ice and Snow I did create a master material containing all the functions to modify the Quixel assets and easily art direct all the scenes.

Thank you for your time and for checking it all out!