UE5: World Building Study II -- AKIRA BOT

UE5: World Building Study II -- Akira Bot
This project started as an homage to Akira Toriyama's art style and designs. The bot was pulled directly from one of his art book/artworks from the 1980s. Akira Toriyama had a profound impact on my journey as an artist. The bot was created entirely in ZBrush -- a continuation of my process of moving all my 3D modeling work into the program. The focus while modeling was to create clean and detailed topology that added some complexity to Akira's design while staying true to his original work. The inner mechanical pieces are modular and built with the ability to be used across the model.

In Unreal Engine 5, the goal was to create an atmospheric, surreal landscape that would ground the model as well as reflect a modern take on a world Toriyama might have himself created. Taking inspiration from the likes of Avatar and Horizon: Forbidden West, I put in elements like the birds, the rain, and other components of living nature.

In the video editing, I did: color correction, a slight blur to mimic a more realistic feel as well as exported the final product in 24 frames/second to give it a more cinematic aesthetic. I added sound design elements from the rain, to the mechanical sounds, and other small bits of nature underneath the soundtrack.

UNREAL ENGINE 5 WORLD BUILDING SERIES SYNOPSIS:
In this project I used a wide range of my professional learnings as well as researched and implemented new techniques I learned specifically in this project:
- Shader building / set up.
- Wetness blueprint for the rocks and land formations.
- Unreal Engine 5's animation system.
- modular building (reusing assets from foliage, to rock formations, to the sky-boat pieces)
- UE5 lumen lighting system
- UE5 raytracing / reflection systems
- UE5 Nanite systems for foliage
- Cinematic Camera placement, animation, and post processing
This project taught me a lot of about the systems inside of UE5 that in my discipline I wouldn't always be responsible for using nor learning. But in this project series I plan to use the full suite of tools UE5 has to offer to create worlds