Nausicaä, The Blue-Clad One (UE4)

After reading the manga "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" by Hayao Miyazaki, I couldn't help thinking how appropiate the story, characters and setting would be for a video game. I love the film, and the manga has an even richer world and cast. I can't recommend it enough.

A year ago, after making Arrietty's Living Room, I reflected on the fact that I rarely do anything character-related, and it would be interesting to break out of my comfort zone and give that a try.
In a sense, I envisioned this as a demo reel of everything I've learned in the past few years having worked as a real-time vfx artist, prop & npc character modeler, technical artist and currently lighting & level artist.

I started with a basic third person character blueprint in UE4, using Mixamo animations to speed up the process. I had to learn the basics of animation blueprints and blendspaces, including delving into skeletal mesh systems a bit more to create different outfits, attachments, foot IK placement nightmares etc, while the environment artist in me enjoyed making different locations from the film and manga.

On Christmas day, I decided that a playable demo wouldn't be feasible so I started the trailer you see here. From that moment on, most of the new characters, environments and outfits I created were done for specific parts of the trailer and I tried to make them consistent with the music (Joe Hisaishi's Tori No Hito or 'Bird Person').
While there is a lot of room for improvement (I made some mistakes early on that thwarted most attemps at properly using cloth simulation on Nausicaä herself), I'm pleased with the overall result and even shocked that my architecture-focused self was able to do some of the things you will find here.
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Developed with UE 4.19 and UE 4.25 and using the free version of the Gfur plugin by GiM Studio for some plants and characters. The font used at 1:39 is WeComeInPeace by Nate Piekos. I also used the Autobiped script by Ofer Zelichover and Dan Babcock to improve the Mixamo skinning of some characters.