I worked out that I’ll only need 2 sets (the city and Nathan’s loft) and thankfully was able to find cheap assets to work with!
The City
I feel like I should probably come up with a name for the city lol. But anyway I really just wanted a vibey industrial cyberpunk vibe, loads of purple, neon, holo billboards etc. I followed a tutorial initially to get me going
I began by creating the base for the hologram billboards. As part of my vision, I wanted to have an ad that was specifically showcasing the Eve dolls, so I got to work on that. I shot the footage for the ad in Sims 4 It was the easiest and quickest way I could do it. I also found some additional gifs from giphy of existing media that I felt matched the vibe.
Everything was then added into Adobe After Effects, where I did some extra work on the colours and made them transparent to get them ready for importing into UE5. I had to import them out as image sequences rather than videos.
I then began actually constructing the city scene. I ran into some trouble right off the bat trying to get the assets working in my project but I figured out that I needed to migrate the assets from the project file that came into my project. I also kept getting frequent crashes, but I figured out I just needed to change the graphics API UE5 was using to DirectX.
Building up the city was actually quite easy and a little therapeutic, lol. I added a camera and added assets to suit the camera angle I wanted. I added lighting, fog, and of course, my holograms to the scene after converting them to sprite assets.
I’m really happy with how it all turned out 🙂
The storyboard vs final render