Hey all!
This is the beginning of a big project of mine: ARBENNIAN.
It’s a love child born out of my long time passion for Warhammer 40k following the steps of a Harlequin.
My personal goal for this project was to use Unreal Engine 5 as much as possible, including simulations. The results were truly mind blowing!
I tried to not compromise for anything, from polycount to texture size or material number. The goal was to use the same approach for offline rendered cinematics and port that into Unreal. Needless to say, the ability to everything in real time and do tweaks on the flight was priceless!
The complicated aspect of the project came with the idea to simulate the cape of the character using Chaos Physics directly inside the engine. It took roughy 3 months to come up with a custom system that would allow the character to have total freedom of motion without creating artifacts. Especially considering that the cloth was doublesided with thickness and needed to have 2 different types of materials.
I think the animation, done by my friend Aron Durkin, really shows how big the potential is for accurate Cloth Simulations.
I think it’s super exciting to imagine what we’ll be able to do in the future using Unreal Engine. So far it has been the coolest ride!
For the character itself, I wanted to go for a design that was both dark and mysterious as well as vibrant considering the origins of the protagonist. I decided to go for a very batman/V for Vendetta-esque design. I was always a huge fan of V and I love the fact that his silhouette was almost just a black shape with a single focus point, being his mask. So when the Harlequin would be at rest or observing he would appear as a shadowy figure, but if the situation required some action he could easily move his cape around showing of very vibrant colours on both the inside of the cape itself as well as on his right leg and belt.
Huge thanks go to Aron Durkin , who has kindly contributed to the technical set up for this character as well as crating that awesome animation!
Also big shout out to Julen Urrutia who has been watching over this project form the very beginning and helped me out a lot especially in the concepting phase!
Here’s a link to all the high res pics of the project: ArtStation - Arbennian - Unreal Engine 5
Thanks for watching!
I know your mouth was agape with awe after seeing your passion come together, especially after 3 months of hard work on the cape physics alone!