THE PROJECT.
"I am Ezio Auditore from Florence..."
The goal of this 3rd-year group project was to recreate the final sequences of the Assassin’s Creed II trailer.
Ambiented in Venice with Ezio Auditore as the protagonist, Assassin’s Creed II was one of the most successful titles in the saga and in the whole video game world.
Ours is a tribute to this incredible video game, and the additional challenge we proposed to the students was to create it with a painterly effect style, just like in the famous Netflix series Arcane, inspired by the video game League of Legends.
The entire project was developed to run inside Unreal Engine 5, where we tested this real-time rendering engine to create a cinematic from scratch. This allowed us to drastically reduce rendering times and handle complex scenes and lighting with no issues, all in real time.
THE CHARACTERS
Character Creation and Design.
The character concept was developed by carefully studying all the references taken from Arcane and other similar projects, such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
The goal was to recreate the technique of making textures and materials appear hand-painted, while adopting a style with more cartoon-like and stylized shapes and proportions.
Environmet
Painting Venice
After identifying which shots would include 2D or 3D elements, we began modeling houses, docks, various props such as the gondola, crates, and the canals of Venice. For these elements too, we had to find the right style—one that allowed us to maintain enough detail while still resembling an illustration. Some backgrounds were completely redrawn by hand and later composited using Nuke.
UNREAL ENGINE.
For this project we decided to render it entirely using Unreal Engine.
Unreal is a rendering engine used to create video games, but it is increasingly being studied and leveraged for producing short films and cinematics. This is because, thanks to real-time rendering, it allows creators to see the result immediately without having to wait for long calculation times, as happens with more traditional software such as Maya/Arnold.
