3D Modeling for Games

Project Breakdown

For the Main Cinematic render of the environment, I used Epic's new Android Live Link app to connect my phone to Unreal. It was very easy to set up, and we were up and running in about 5 minutes

During the entire workflow, the scene was made using Blender and Maya for modeling and Unreal Engine 5 for the scene setup. Up until the final moments, I was working exclusively with Lumen, when I decided to try out the new path tracer. It took a little bit of tweaking but the results turned out very good.

Scene Progress

Prop Breakdown

Reference Board

Props

One of my favorite tricks in doing CG Renders is to just add a black-and-white filter. It really reminds me of movies like Sin City which is one of my favorite titles.

Blockout to end result

Day vs Night Scene

Render Passes

I got inspired to make the main characters of The Cuphead Show after I finished watching the animated series. In making this project I learned how to make a simple toon shader and how to make low-poly characters. I used the real-time rendering engine EEVEE in Blender to render out the characters. The making and fine-tuning of the project took me about 3 days.

Cuphead

Mugman

How I Made The Toon Shader

I made this simple shader for the characters by using a Diffuse BSDF shader then adding a Shader to RGB node and connecting it to a Color Ramp node. On the Color Ramp node, I changed the interpolation from Linear to Constant and picked two colors one for the base color and the other for the shadows.

For the outline, I added a Solidify Modifier to the object increased the thickness a bit, and flipped the normal. I also added an Emission shader changed the color to black, enabled Backface Culling, and assigned it to the same object and achieved the black outline.

Difference between an outline and no outline on a toon shader.

Thanks to everyone for the attention, and thanks to the M3DS Academy and my Instructors for helping me along the way.