CROSS HATCHING
Yukun Fang
TEKKONKINKREET
Type: Environmental Art
Individual Work
Role: All Aspects
Time: 2023
Material:
UE5 Engine, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Maya
Overview
This project is an homage to the esteemed Japanese artist Taiyo Matsumoto, particularly his iconic work in the animated film “TEKKONKINKREET.” The core objective was to reimagine and revive the film’s quintessential scenes within the realms of interactive media, specifically through the lens of Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). By converting 2D animation into immersive 3D environments, the endeavor was not only a technical challenge but also an artistic pursuit, aiming to capture the heavily stylized essence of Japanese animation within a game engine.
The learning curve was steep, as the project demanded a deep dive into the game scene production pipeline. It necessitated a mastery of UE5’s capabilities to replicate the intricate visual style and dynamic atmospheres found in “TEKKONKINKREET.” Through trial and error, I honed my skills in achieving specific visual effects, discovering innovative techniques to bring the 2D art to life in a 3D space. This exploration of the engine’s potential was pivotal in faithfully translating Matsumoto’s art into a new dimension.
Detail
Displays
Art by Taiyo Matsumoto
Movie Cutscene from Tekkonkinkreet
Taiyo Matsumoto's paintings have influenced many artists, and I'm
no exception, so I've created this environment art exercise in an attempt to recreate Taiyo Matsumoto's wonderful art style in the form of a 3d game scene.
Model
Process
Perspective
Inaccuracy
There are many perspective inaccuracies in the original drawing, most notably in this car. The car has four different perspectives from four different angles, but this inaccuracy is the key to the stylization, which makes the image look flatter while making the object dynamics more interesting.
The sides of the car require the same compression of perspective and need to be exaggerated as much as possible to bring out the effect of a large front and a small back.
The car in the original drawing gives an overall sense of flatness, but at the same time gives the illusion as if it has a strong perspective, and in order to achieve this feeling in the engine, the perspective of the vehicle needs to be compressed, compressing the whole vehicle from right to left.
Unlike the right side, the left side of the vehicle requires the rear to be zoomed out for the effect that the view still passes through the rear windshield despite such extreme perspective.
Texture & Lighting
Process
Hand Painted Highlight
Often the time the environment light in engine is too harsh for stylized scene, and it is difficult to realize the contrast of retaining the brightness of the highlights while preserving the details, so the highlights need to be processed in advance in the material.
Hand Painted
Stylized Glass Material
The glass assets in the stylized scene don’t exactly follow the physical properties of glass, and color used for these assets are vibrant and exaggerated. Due the limitation of engine, it’s really hard achieve these effect with conventional glass material. Therefore I chose a tricky but same time simple way to achieve this effect.
​
With very low emissive intensity, around 0.015 of multiplier value, barely cause any affects to the surrounding environment.
Stylized Grass
I used Designer and Maya to created the basic model and material for the stylized grass, then gave it a simple wind effect in UE5. I didn’t chose to use RVT material for the color variation control of the grass, this is because the ground dirt and grass are distinct with each other in the movie concept, it would be hard to control the RVT painting boundary. Therefore, I chose to make three different color grass foliage, from bright to dark, for the better control of colors.
Auxiliary Lighting
I frequently used a lot of lighting to portray a single asset in this scene, this was due to the art style and artistic manipulation of the original painting, which resulted in the brightness of the object’s color often not matching the environment, this is an issue for the engine and needs to be implemented through shaders or auxiliary lighting.
Although the details of the highlights and ambient lighting were pre-made in the Painter, however, due to the actual lighting in the engine, these colors, especially the whites, were not able to achieve the brightness that these colors had in the original painting, thus I chose to go through a series of auxiliary lighting to achieve the desired effect.
The colors are dull and inaccurate, white balance was effected by environment.
Without Auxiliary Lighting
Light intensity is difficult to control, and sometimes trying to achieve light intensity accuracy in bright areas usually results in an overall loss of detail in dark areas.
Environmental Lighting Only
This is the most restored color and lighting effect.
