For this project, I took a lot of inspiration from Into the Spiderverse and Batman Beyond. These pieces of concept art served as the main style inspiration, a night city lit by bright blues and reds. I especially was inspired by the Spiderverse art of the city, and the bright lights emitting from below the buildings giving off a great sense of depth.

A big challenge I had when creating this project was my desire two use two different animation programs. While wanting to utilize the faster rendering and Lumen capabilities of Unreal Engine, I found an awesome rig that was only compatible with Blender. While it would've been ideal to directly import my rig and animation directly into Unreal, the Blender-specific constraints of the rig I found did not make this possible. Therefore, I had to find a way to combine my Unreal Scene with my character animation.

To create a believable final render, I utilized the 360 camera in Unreal Engine, or Scene Capture Cube, to get an HDRI of my environment. I then imported that HDRI into Blender, allowing it to light my scene. I added additional lighting to create a more believable render, specifically adding a strong blue light to reflect the intense glow of the city. I then rendered with a shadow map, and used my EXR render in After Effects to composite the character animation believably into the environment.

Initially, I had wanted my scene to be accompanied by a torrential downpour of rain. While I axed this detail in the final version due to time constraints, I added it in this alternative version. To create the rain effect, I used two Unreal Engine particle systems, one for the rain itself and the second for ground splash. I rendered out these two particle systems as individual EXR sequences, allowing me to make specific edits and color correction within After Effects to have them best fit the scene.

To use the rig, I had to take on the new task of learning how to animate in Blender. Although I struggled with the UI and Blender-specific features, I eventually got the hang of this new animation program and became comfortable with the program. This challenge, with the set camera movement given to participants, allowed me to really push the character animation by cheating the camera.