"SMALL SOLDIERS | War For The Nekron" Proof of Concept Making Of
I animated the first ever animation on the project, which succesfully merged our custom rig and Nanite meshes inside unreal. This animation brought us a lot of joy.
I animated a second test. This time the focus was on creating a cinematic sequence that could summarize animation style. Chunky toy movement, more agile and acrobatic movement and finally character performance.
I keyframe animated the plastics using bones and blendshapes. No actual simulation was used since we had limited resources
First animated tests with Ray, still using Lumen's VT shadows.
This test animation was done by Julen Urrutia.
I made this animation to try and design some toy like animation movements. Not fully succesfull yet but it was a very usefull test.
This video shows the workflow followed in Zbrush to create and export the toys.
Here we see the import process for the toys and the settings inside UE5
Showcase of basic options of the Toy material.
Showcase of Damage options of the Toy material.
Showcase of the Dust options of the Toy material.
Showcase of the Metal Mask options of the Toy material. The metal mark detects and area on a black and white gradient. It can also soften or contrast the selected area.
Showcase of the Metal Mask 1.
Showcase of the Metal Mask 2.
Showcase of the flexibility and variation the the Toy material offers.
All of these toys were created using the same input model, by modifying only the parameters on my Procedural Toy Material.
The possibilities are endless!
[DISCLAIMER: Small Soldiers War for the Nekron is a Proof of Concept project in which our team was hired by Comadran Studios to create a set of toy characters during some months from 2022-2023. The conclussion of the project was the Proof of Concept trailer that brought those new characters to life. We would like to clarify that our team does not own these characters and we do not know what comes next for them after the this Proof of Concept. Designs and story might not represent the final product as they are subject to change during production.]
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I co-directed this Small Soldiers: Wars for the Nekron Proof of Concept trailer with my brother Julen Urrutia. Aside from directing, I was in charge of designing the full cast of Nekronites, art directing and supervising their models that we creating along with Giulio Marrone and David Puertas, rigging the full Nekronites cast, developing the rig technology necessary to have Nanite meshes on the moving characters, creating the Procedural Toy Material (showcased above), and animating many of the characters throughout the trailer and animating the breaking plastics. Additionaly I helped with a few lighting scenes, but the vast majority of the short film was lit by Julen, who also did the scene assembly using the assets that Josu Martin, Xabier Sevillano, David Puertas, Giulio Marrone and Jesus Gomez created.
It was a huge task, working in almost every department of the film while trying to keep a consistent vision for the whole team.
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Most of these things we take for granted when watching movies, but in CG you start from a white canvas, and everything you place in the world to make it believable has to be art directed to achieve the desired effect. That was our major focus on the project, to create a seemingly simple scenario, and to fill it with all the complexities of real life, while also trying to achieve a very dramatic and cinematic mood that would fit the story of these toys that take themselves way too seriously.