Small Soldiers War for the Nekron - Props Toys Part 1 (UE 5)
The oppening shots of the proof of concept
The following images were directly captured from the Viewport in Unreal Engine.
The lighting has been adjusted so that you can appreciate the amount of toys on the shelves and all around the warehouse.
We prepared a couple of levels to showcase the toys. Below, you'll see a few sets of those toys.
The Ninja Frogs, articulated action toys. This was the very first prop toy I did for the proof of concept and the one I used to test our workflow. We were still still deciding how much time to allocate for each set of toys
As mentioned earlier, we needed to dress the stage with many toys. To achieve this, we set ourselves a time limit of around 3 days per toy set, which is quite short. How did we manage to do it?
On one hand, we took advantage of the benefits of Unreal Engine 5's Nanite technology, which helped us in two aspects: having models with higher detail and at the same time a greater quantity of assets in the scene.
On the other hand, Xabier Urrutia (co-director of the proof of concept) developed shaders in UE 5 in which, through the sole input of vertex color and a wide range of parametrizable aspects, we had the asset finished in a short period of time.
In summary, we condensed the entire workflow down to just two software programs: ZBrush and Unreal Engine.
The result speaks for itself
In my case, the extra motivation I had to create something special with our team may have helped me produce the assets in such limited time.
It took me just one working day to have the first model ready for Unreal. To create variations for each of them, I reused the body for all and simply modified their heads, weapons, and colors.
Classic plastic robot toy, I also I tried to simulate the seams of the plastic as it came out of a mold.
This toy is an example of how, in other cases, instead of making color variations in Zbrush, we used the shader itself in Unreal to create color variations for the toys
A doll house based in Baba Yaga's folklore
And the creepiest baby doll I could do.
End of part 1, see you in the part 2.
[DISCLAIMER: Small Soldiers War for the Nekron is a Proof of Concept project in which our team was hired by Comadran Studios to create a set of toy characters during some months from 2022-2023. The conclussion of the project was the Proof of Concept trailer that brought those new characters to life. We would like to clarify that our team does not own these characters and we do not know what comes next for them after the this Proof of Concept. Designs and story might not represent the final product as they are subject to change during production.]
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The entire action of the proof of concept takes place in the warehouse of a toy store, we had to design a wide variety of toys to dress up the warehouse. Many of them can be clearly seen in the first shots, but there are others that go more unnoticed. In this post, you will see some of those designs that we created on the go to bring the warehouse to life.
In order to have a decent amount of toys, we set a tight deadline of 3 days for each set of toys, from modeling to shading in Unreal Engine. Our workflow allowed us to model and color the toys in Zbrush and have them directly working in Unreal Engine, thanks to our shading system using vertex color.