Exilii Drop Pod

As the senior technical artist at AOIN, I had the great opportunity to work on a short film as a content pitch for the Vegas Sphere. As part of this sci-fi short, I designed this drop-pod craft for the climatic moment that ends the piece.

The concept was drawn up in CAD for speed and flexibility of modelling before exporting to Blender for final detailing and UV unwrapping to UDIMs. Texturing was done in Substance Painter and then sent to UE, where we animated the final film using virtual textures to support the UDIMs.

To animate the craft, I used a technique demonstrated by Epic. I worked with a low-poly proxy skeletal mesh that I set up with Control-Rig, then attached the full-quality nanite meshes over this model and hid the proxy for the final renders. This allowed me simple controls for the flaps and clamps while still having high-density cinematic meshes.

I also designed the re-entry flames shader and particle systems, in order to get the final effect of the ship burning through the atmosphere.