HYPNEROTOMACHIA
In the 15th century book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a prince journeys through an esoteric and mythological dreamworld in order to find his princess, Polia. The book, and the surreal, erotic, and labyrinthine world it described, became one of the most influential masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. The text is illustrated with over 150 woodcut engravings, sometimes attributed to Sandro Botticelli.
For a forthcoming animated film, I will be adapting several of the woodcuts into full 3D sequences. While the woodcuts are conceptually dense, their simple linework and lack of color gave lots of room for interpretation and made for a very challenging project.
All assets in this project are designed to be game engine ready.
The final clothing pieces were then taken into Character Creator 4 where they were weight painted onto a basic character mesh. Once the weight painting is done, the clothing is able to be fitted onto any custom character that I make.
The clothing was left in a basic monochrome red color- both to match the monochrome coloring of real renaissance/medieval clothes, and also to make it so any given clothing item can be easily color changed by modifying the hue/saturation/contrast/brightness sliders.
All designs are based on a variety of references pulled from high medieval, renaissance, and ancient greek artwork.
The foliage is modeled as pure geometry so it can run with UE5’s Nanite. Nanite foliage made from modeled leaves often outperforms traditional alpha-masked foliage because it avoids overdraw. I’m using this scene as an opportunity to test that workflow and performance difference in Unreal Engine 5.6.
References for the foliage assets were pulled from the Hypnerotomachia etchings, a variety of Renaissance paintings, and some photos of real life Tuscan countryside.