Rainy Season (Personal work with Meta Human / RT Scenes in UE)

This work won Asiagraph Tokyo 2021 award.

Here is a series of images I came up recently when I was testing couple of MetaHuman characters I made.

I have always been big fan of Asian cinema, especially The Scent of Green Papaya and Wong Kar-Wai films. I tried to nail a kind of spy drama feel set in pre-war Vietnam. Having very rough plan in my mind I literally just jumped into UE, following the idea in my mind. I blocked out the scene quickly by modeling rough boxes in 3ds Max to get a feel of the scene and characters placements.

I like to listen appropriate music when working. I find this helps to keep creativity in the right track. Making this I listened Gustavo Santaolalla‎ Tout nous sépare. (When looking for plugins for UE, I found that in Rain Effects demo video the creator used music by Santaolalla‎, interesting coincidence)

Getting MetaHumans posed in Unreal via Bridge is very smooth, literally click and forget kind of solution.

And gosh they look so real. I really feel connected to the characters and they are responding similar way as real actors would with phenomenal facial rigging and body rig. This invites experimentation with different facial expressions and looks.

This oddly reminded me of the time when I was a portrait photographer. I even felt like I should consider their feelings. I am just waiting for my first dream about MetaHumans (I hope she leaves the revolver home though).

The asset workflow was fast. I didn't want to use time for modeling so Vu’s dress was done very quickly using Marvelous Designer, ZBrush and Substance Painter. I rigged the dress in Maya to the MetaHuman skeleton and it went as expected. Man I love BRSMOOTHWEIGHTS which is the free plugin for Maya that helps out with smoothing skin weights. Having drastically different mesh and using transfer skin weights can cause issues that can be remedied with this. Really recommend to get this if you are Maya user.

I do kind of wish I had spent more time on planning phase as I had to do a second pass on Vu's dress due to it lacking appropriate wrinkle detail. But reimporting to the engine was perfectly smooth. It is really nice to see that what I see in Maya is perfectly replicated in UE, but then I wasn't going for simulations in this one.

I used Gold Beaded Fabric Substance by my ex Adobe colleague Pauline Boiteux as a base for the dress and added some fast decorative elements. Some of the other assets are from my collection and some are from Quixel Megascans which I modified to fit the scene. Some of the Quixel assets I ran through a pass in Substance Painter to make them more dirty, and also created a detail normal map in Substance Designer.

For rain effect, I purchased the wonderful Rain Effects by VFX4GAME which allowed me to quickly make surfaces wet and also add very nice looking streams of water to the window and walls. And this also animates, fantastically well.

Being Unreal Engine artist in professional capacity, I always like to try new things and get out of my comfort zone. Making this piece felt like I was coordinating beauty.