[WIP] SHIFT - Final Year Game Cinematic Trailer Project

Hi everyone! We’re a group of final-year students from the University of Hertfordshire. We’re creating a sci-fi cinematic trailer for our game SHIFT in Unreal Engine, and we’ll be documenting our process and progress in this thread with regular updates.
Feedback on anything (story beats, environment art, lighting, camera work, animation, VFX, editing, audio) is hugely appreciated. Thanks for checking it out!

Core Members:
Valen Kua Wei Lun: Director, Art Director, Concept Artist - ( Artstation )
Ong Nanxi: Lead Concept Artist, Level Designer - ( Artstation )
Lim Jie: Lead Environment Artist, Prop Artist - ( Artstation )
Zen Seah Song Wei: Lead Character Artist, Environment Artist - ( Artstation )

Synopsys:
In a decaying virtual world on the edge of collapse, you play as a lone maintenance technician sent to restore failing power cores. Wander a tranquil, utopian landscape, then enter broken dimensions within the cores themselves, where gravity twists against you and your shield drains with every step. Navigate perilous platforms, survive the hazards, and ultimately decide the fate of this fragile digital realm.

Some WIP images to show you the mood and feel:

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Here is our animatic and previs done by our concept artists:

And this is our latest cinematic WIP:

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Hi guys! I’m Lim Jie, the Environment Artist on this project. I previously had a Polycount thread documenting my progress, feel free to check it out here: [WIP] SHIFT - Game Cinematic Trailer Project - Environment Artist Dev Log - Third-Year Uni Project — polycount

Below is my current progress on Utopia. Feedback is welcome!

I am following the concept art by Valen:

Here is some lighting progress in Unreal Engine with Lumen:

Shot 01:

Shot 16:

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Companion (Pixy) sketches and explorations

Expression sheet for Pixy :slight_smile: Made a simple animation for our animators to reference

comp_expSht

Updates on Utopia!

  • Redid the bottom part of the building
  • Added decals for the floor

Lighting batch updates!
Shot 7, 8, 9, 16, 17

Nice!

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Main character texture test for my character artist (to see what and how to improve the current version)

Camera update for shot 7

New progress update on our cinematic!

Here are some lighting updates!

Shot 1 I keyframed some blocks to balance out the foreground and midground. Feel free to check them out in our next animation update!

Shot 2

Shot 7, made the lighting darker to show more neon colours.

Shot 8, made a node-based material for the background

Shot 14a lighting and setdress, faked the red pink ring light using 3 planes with the same material in Unreal.

A little interesting OOB point of view. I created a procedural generation blueprint to place the background blocks more efficiently. Its controlled by seeds to maximise the variations while preserving the placement without it regenerating every time we run Unreal.