Some cinematic render tests for the Western Air Temple from Avatar: The Last Airbender that I’ve been working on – still not quite finished, but I thought I’d share where I was at.
I really liked the idea that the walls – the core structure of the temples – were carved directly out of the cliff face (like a lot of old South-Asian temples carved entirely out of stone– and then the platforms and the ‘rooftops’ were built around those stalactite-type structures…. So I suppose this is more of a reinterpretation than a direct one-to-one from the show.
The temples were modelled/sculpted in Blender with the help of megascans textures, while the majority of the cliff faces come from the megascans library proper. Nanite was used on almost everything so the poly-count for this is … high. Lumen for dynamic GI and reflections.
We meet again! There’s not anything you’ve posted here that hasn’t been impressive!
Great work thus far! I’d love to see where this goes! Is there anything coming to mind that you would like to incorporate (methods, practices, add-ons, plug-ins, blueprints/codes) that you haven’t explored before? Has there been any new challenges with this project as opposed to your previous projects?
And yeah, the scale for this one was tricky to dial in - especially when your reference is a cartoon animation where scale can be a bit … wobbly … from scene to scene. I don’t usually do block outs before I do scenes, but for this one it was really necessary to try and get the correct spacing for the cliffs and temples.
As for things I’d like to incorporate - I haven’t really tried out the in-engine modelling tools too much, and it might come in handy for working on the pathways and switchbacks up the cliffs - so we’ll see!
Looks great, had forgotten about this place. Question about the foliage - is everything from Megascans, or did you create anything yourself? How did you get it to work with Lumen?
This awoken something in me. I have seen the ATLA project that they are building in DREAM on PlayStation, but what if they use Unreal Engine 5 for one of the new games that they have announced…
@Andreas_Bjorshol Thanks! Foliage was megascans - and foliage works with lumen now in the 5.0+ releases of UE5! (although you may need to heavily tweak the translucency settings in the foliage materials, otherwise it ends up being wayyy too dark…) That said, always a good idea to double check the lumen scene to confirm that it shows up properly!
@PsiArc haha - hadn’t gotten around to it yet! In theory I think they would also just fly with bison from temple to temple, or there would be pathways within the cliff face + walkways that stretch across the temples themselves. It was a little hard to see with the reference from the animation!
