LogInThe artist utilized UE5's Niagara and animated the character model on 2s to set up the shader.
Pedro Borges, Game Developer and Technical Artist at Redhill Games, recently delivered a masterclass in stylized 3D art, expertly replicating the art style from the Spider-Verse animated movies in Unreal Engine 5.
Inspired by Spider-Verse's use of strokes and smearing to convey movement instead of traditional motion blur, Pedro employed a single Niagara actor to read the screen-space velocity directly from the GBuffer and apply it to a render target using a Grid2D interface to loop through each screen pixel. The rest of the shader setup involved mapping, manipulating, and masking the data within the material. The final character model was animated on 2s by Redhill's Lauri Salo and rendered at 15 FPS, with Paul Ruano-Borbalan serving as the art director.
"Compared to reading SceneTexture:Velocity directly in the post-process shader, this approach gives me way more flexibility and allows me to accumulate or modify that buffer over time in Niagara, whereas SceneTexture only reads the current buffer value," commented the artist.
According to Pedro, the character was set up for a WIP cinematic, set to be released sometime in the future. We highly encourage you to follow the creator on Twitter so as not to miss any future updates.
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