Astropulse: Reincarnation
April 18th, 2024
Astropulse: Reincarnation, the new single-player, sci-fi third-person shooter/RPG set on a war-torn future Earth from Imagendary Studios and creative director, Wei Wang. We were working on the cinematic and the game prototype at the same time using UE5 before the major layoffs occurred.
I started working on Astropulse as one of the senior lighters. I later worked as the Lead Digimatte Artist figuring out how to create better looking environments through digital matte painting and helping build out a team, while still helping light some shots and integrate them using Unreal Engine 5.
Digital Matte Painting work: Antarctica, flower field, space nebula shots. Lighting/Comp work: Flower field, space nebula, zombie city, mutant with exposed heart, and queen with blood wings.
Digital Matte Paintings Solo
Director: “I’d like to have a stormy sky in the horizon giving off an eerie light in the glacial cracks of Antarctica” Me: “I’m familiar with both from past experience, let’s do it!” A full breakdown can be seen below of this shot.
Here’s a break down of the opening digital matte painting shot on the cinematic done in UE5 for Imagendary Studios‘s Astropulse universe. I first created the sky in Photoshop, with hints of towering mountains deep in the atmosphere. Then animated the clouds as if it were a super storm cell rotating in a big cyclone off the horizon. After that, I painted in some cloud lightning flashes and bolts that could be animated later in comp. There was a big central bolt for the transition to the next shot.
For the canyon, I made a base 3D render in Terragen, with a little help from USGS’s Grand Canyon geo data set, enhanced with extra clean up, erosion, and noise functions. Put in some lights, fog, and then brought them into Photoshop as passes. Painted on top of that together with the sky, and handed it off to artist Jun Sun who did additional texture work on the canyon as I helped supervise the rest of the shots on the show.
After the dmp was completed, I split up the layers and projected them back onto simple geometry, and threw it back into UE to render out. The foreground with beetles was a team effort of a number of environment & surfacing artists. The wonderful final comp was done in Nuke by Fabio Stabel.
Video of an early test of animating the lightning textures and the warping of the sky (exaggerated for the shot) below:
This digital matte painting was done for the second Antarctica shot in the cinematic.
This digital matte painting was done for the shot panning down to the ice encased beetle Antarctica shot in the cinematic. I built the terrain using Terragen and then further developed and painted on top of it.