Sunset Drive
Personal Project Created using Maya, Blender, Unreal Engine, and Nuke.
These are some fun renders I created of my girlfriend’s cat driving a Nissan R34 Skyline GTR at sunset across a long beach road. I have a lot of great memories driving along similar intercostal roads at sunset in Florida, so I wanted to push myself to recreate that same sunset lighting and feeling within a scene in Unreal Engine. I also felt like it could be really awesome if the person driving was my girlfriend’s cat, Rosie, wearing sunglasses.
After gathering reference and looking through old sunset photos I had taken, I began assembling and modeling the assets that I would need. The Skyline GTR model that I chose to use had no interior, so I went ahead and kit bashed all the interior elements from other free car models. I then modeled any missing car elements myself. After finishing all the assets, I brought the model into Unreal Engine and textured the car using Blender and through Unreal’s material graph.
After getting the model for the car setup and textured, I found a base model for a cat that I liked the look of, then posed it driving. From there, I mocked a quick scene of the road, beach and ocean and began placing cameras and figuring out what shots I would animate and render. I settled on these 3 main shot angles for how the cat would drive the car.
Knowing what the shots were going to look like also helped me understand how I needed the cat to move within the scene. So I went ahead and rigged the cat and created its groom within XGen in Maya, then brought the groom into Unreal Engine for texturing and rig attachment.
With all of the rigs ready, it was time to dial in the environment more and animate the rough layout of how the car would drive through the scene. I modeled the road and then animated the car driving along that road. I brought the road into Unreal Engine for set dressing. Now that I understood where each of the cameras would be looking, I created the terrain for the beach in Unreal Engine, placed the ocean, and began dressing the set with all of the vegetation, rocks, and props needed. I also went ahead and textured the road. Lastly, I setup the sky using the Ultra Dynamic Sky plugin, and Dylan Browne’s Ocean Systems for Rendered Cinematics add on.
Now that the set and assets were completed, I moved onto animating the cat, car, and cameras. I also added in a few additional shots of the ocean, road, license plate and paw.
Next, I brought all of the animation into Unreal Engine for lighting. I wanted to capture that golden hour sunset feel, and so I focused on creating more strong highlights and contrast across the cat’s face, as well as catching reflective glints off of the car and sunglasses.
While rendering the lighting, I also made sure to render out a depth pass. Then within Nuke, I added depth of field to the scene to help make it feel like it was shot through a real camera lens.
