ABOUT
See how it all began in “The World of Shōgun”. Experience the history behind the rise of Warlords, Samurai, and a powerful new empire in Feudal Japan. Based on James Clavell’s novel, FX’s Shōgun is set in Japan in the year 1600 at the dawn of a century-defining civil war. Lord Yoshii Toranaga is fighting for his life as his enemies on the Council of Regents unite against him, when a mysterious European ship is found marooned in a nearby fishing village.
PROCESS
Throughout 2023(and the beginning of 2024), I worked as a freelance 3D generalist/cinematic artist at Method Studios. During that time we used Unreal Engine to craft an entire 6-minute CG short inside Unreal Engine 5. As a generalist on this project I handled a lot of different aspects from animation, layout, lighting, and modeling to final compositing.
Seiji Anderson, the art director on the project, created a a card-based " sumi-stroke" blueprint and material which we could apply to multiple meshes and environment objects to give the piece a painterly effect. We applied these strokes and materials throughout every shot, placing the cards by hand. The 3D team at method crafted several high-quality character sculpts which were mapped onto Metahuman rigs in-engine. We rendered the characters as seperate passes in the Unreal Pathtracing renderer and composited them ontop of Lumen renders inside Nuke. Houdini sims were created by the FX team(Tomas Slancik) for blood, armor fx, dirt, and hair which were imported into engine via alembics. On this page you'll find several shots that I spent the majority of the project on(including the above marching shot) although everyone had a hand in almost everty shot, passing them back and forth as needed to push them over the finish line. It was a huge team effort and one of the most challenging and interesting projects I've been involved in.
You can see a full breakdown on Method Studio's site here.