My goal is to create an epic cinematic scene with the theme of “The Journey”. The main character is a girl named Exparia. There’s a wordplay of – Explorer (in my gallery all of my girl characters have names of something like ”-aria”). She is a Mech Pilot on a mission to explore a new world for mankind. There is a little story behind this scene, as you can see in the concept, a giant wormhole appears above the Earth orbit, some kind of stone alien structures are floating around it, which tells us that this wormhole is no work of nature. It was built artificially and has some sinister purpose. Mankind decides to send a voyage fleet to explore what lies behind the wormhole. All the mechs carried in the fleet are called “Kamikaze”, which means they are the first to go to the front line but most likely they won’t come back. They are trained as both scientists and soldiers at the same time. And our main character – Exparia is in one of the mech swith a smile on her face – showing her urge to explore the new world, anxious about the potential threats she might face.

The final result of the project will not be just a static image but also a small cinematic shot with animation & effects – all done in UE4. By working on this project I really want to push my skills in terms of both art and technique. There are organic characters with clothes, robots/mechs, hard surface indoor environment and open world environments in the background, etc. There are a lot of things that I can push and challenge myself to refine my skills, knowledge in the workflow and different tools to make it work best in UE4. And like I said above, all workflow is resolved around UE4.

One small note is that, since there are so many things listed down, you might ask what’s the main element in this project? It’s the main character & UE4 potential ability in rendering quality images & animation for production. As my background is more of character art and Thunder Cloud’s strongest service is character art. So the project best serves as a R&D and training project for me and the team at Thunder Cloud.

2D Concept

A good 3D artist is a role that stands somewhere in between, blending artistic & technical 3D stuff. I have been training painting digital 2D art and concept at the same time I picked up 3D. Being able to work as a 2d artist allows me to think much more freely in terms of concept, design & color, not being limited to what’s available in 3D tech and software. In this particular project, I aim toward a very stylized visual style of a digital 2D painting with a little bit of PBR shaders look.