MACHINA

A visual piece that started out as an animation and cinematography exercise. I ended up spending a while on doing the lighting from scratch and converted the project to use the new Substrate materials in Unreal for more textural quality. All of the smoke is created as Niagara fluid sims made in Unreal, it's a lot of fun to play with. To control it from the sequencer and get it to render out correctly I used the simulation caching plugin for Niagara, which works really well and gives a lot of viewport perfomance back.
I got a great start on the Niagara fluids from watching Jesse Pitelas free introductory course, can very much recommend!

The character is hand animated which I think works mostly because I focused on keeping the character only partly in frame and otherwise doing a lot of closeups. It is a little rough around the edges as I am not an animator, but I think it works pretty well nonetheless.

I wanted to really push this in the grade as well, so I referenced the look of the new Blade Runner to get a moody blue tone, that feels cohesive throughout. It was graded in Davinci Resolve Studio, which is also where I put the sound design together.

It is mainly based on the Factory Environment Collection by Denys Rutkovskyi where I kept the main layout he has done, but enhanced a lot of the materials, moved some things around, and added a lot more set dressing and decals to make it look more desolate and rough. All assets are from the marketplace and megascans collection.

Hope you like it!