The Matrix Awakens, An Unreal Engine 5 Experience
I'm pleased to finally share the work my colleagues and I have created for "Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience".
The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is now available for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/wakeup
Download the City Sample project https://unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/learn/city-sample to see these crowds in action, or grab the City Sample Crowd Asset Pack https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/city-sample-crowds to use them into your own project.
This is a collection of stills that include work I contributed to on the project. I mostly worked on procedural textures and material graphs for the Freeways, Roads, Rooftops, Sidewalks, and the Crowd Costumes, plus a few traditional textures on props and costumes, including a main character's long coat outfit.
Check out the rest of the team's work here:
Lana Lan
https://www.artstation.com/lanaconqueso
Jerome Platteaux
https://www.artstation.com/feaneroh
Nicole Gorny
https://www.artstation.com/ssjtroll
Bastian Hoppe
https://www.artstation.com/fatrobot
Quentin Marmier
https://www.artstation.com/quentinmarmier
Julien Didisheim
https://www.artstation.com/juliendidisheim
Nicholas Boulanger
https://www.artstation.com/nicholas_boulanger
A few of these prop assets (benches, signs, handrails) have traditional textures on them.
Other assets like the sidewalks, curbs, etc., have base textures from Quixel, a few with some custom alterations, with additional variation in the form of procedural texturing in the material in engine to give a more natural, organic look to the streets.
The Road textures were built similarly, with a few great UV tricks to help with seaming. Check out the tech talk here to see what we did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLVJP-o0g28
The Rooftops and their buildings were also textured in the same vein, Quixel bases with a few custom alterations and a procedural texturing system to create grunge, environmental effects, color variation, and weathering.
The freeways were created very similar to the roads with some visual differences and major UV solutions to seaming issues. Because we had miles and miles of freeways to texture, we had to rely chiefly on procedural texturing.
The freeway props (dividers, siderails, supports) were mostly traditionally textured by my colleagues.
For the Building textures, we combined the high resolution of procedural texturing with a system of asset-specific maps to give us a realistic look. Check out the tech talk to see more!
Some of our residential streets have some fun signs and other details to look out for!
Our landing point - this section also has some fun goodies in it.
Our city has a moody, elemental feel to it thanks to the puddles and beautiful sky. The puddles are part of the road procedural texturing system.
The material graph for the costumes was created for maximum flexibility for a city's worth of office workers. To get the most out of our wardrobe of office staples, we added a variety of clothing fabrics, colors, and patterns.
To make sure the outfits didn't look too randomly thrown together or too , we went through all the options of colors and patterns and selected a large number of possibilities that could go with each other to create mini themed wardrobes.
These wardrobes were then selected at random when the crowd is generated.