Icaro Cinematic

Icaro was very much influenced by old Blizzard cinematics, they had a huge effect on me joining the game industry. This project began as a little smoke sim as I wanted to familiarize myself with the Unreal gas system and spiraled into learning about animation of a Metahuman through Live Link, texturing my own metahuman and controlling shaders through the sequencer. I wanted everything to be inside of Unreal and wanted to push the engine in terms of fluid simulation and lighting.

For sound, I made a quick track in Ableton, fairly basic squarish SAW with 1 oscillator in Serum and a kick is most of the sound. Elias Riche created foley effects (light flickers sfx, power up sfx, heartbeat sfx, vocal breath out sfx) and I mixed everything in Resolve.

Surrounding props were all made in Plasticity, mid poly created in Blender and textured in Painter.

Rendered the sequence into EXR out of Unreal into Resolve. Rendered into a AcesCG color space, exported to Rec709. Did a bit of color grading and exported to Handbrake for a final H265 encoding.

Icaro, a medicine song performed by a curandero. Smoke is associated with the ritualistic cleansing.

4K Still

Realtime unreal viewport. Its pretty close to the final output. Most of the post is adding better film grain and better glow than whats available in Unreal. The ability to render in EXR gives you more range on shadow and color editing.

I'm using the cavity map as a mask to get fine contrast on the skin texture, the layer above the mask has a height map, essentially creating that look of facepaint being overlaid on skin, drying, and cracking.

This was textured super fast, the focus was never going to be on this asset, but it needed to feel high quality and near-future-ish

Plasticity viewport screenshot. Using the metahuman head mesh as a reference to model around.

I made a couple of patterns to use for surfaces, these are inspired by Shipibo textiles.

Ableton Live view, pretty basic track setup. Made the lead/basslines in Serum.

Da Vinci Resolve grading, not a whole lot of extra work here, just making things feel a little better. Adding some glow, film grain, halation.

WIP progress on the head

Ref board! I usually throw in WIPS right on there and stack them next to each other to evaluate whether or not Im just noodling or making real progress.