Mooncop
PRODUCED BY
YEAR
Zechen Huang
2024
TOOLS
Unreal Engine 5 | Blender | Houdini
Recreate the Graphic Novel ‘MOONCOP’
- Stylised Hand Drawn (PostProcess)
- Big environment with Small scenes
- Moon Cop, The Girl, Moon Car, Landscape...
MOONCOP
Using Unreal Engine 5, I recreated a one-minute short animation of a section from the graphic novel Mooncop. All characters were modeled, rigged, and animated in Blender.
The "Guardian "cartoonist relates the daily deadpan adventures of the last policeman living on the moon
"Living on the moon . . . Whatever were we thinking? . . . It seems so silly now."
The lunar colony is slowly winding down, like a small town circumvented by a new super highway. As our hero, the Mooncop, makes his daily rounds, his beat grows ever smaller, the population dwindles. A young girl runs away, a dog breaks off his leash, an automaton wanders off from the Museum of the Moon. Each day that the Mooncop goes to work, life gets a little quieter and a little lonelier.
Mooncop - Tom Gauld
Crafting an animated walk cycle involves a sequence of carefully drawn frames that showcase key positions of motion. By repeating these frames, characters move fluidly, creating a lifelike walking effect. Precision in timing and spacing ensures a natural, seamless flow, adding dynamic motion to the animation.
Animated Walk Cycles
Modelling creates 3D characters, while rigging adds a skeletal structure for movement and animation control.
Modeling & Rigging
The Mooncar
Animation matching sound involves synchronizing visual movements with audio, enhancing the impact of each scene. Guided by the storyboard, this process ensures seamless transitions, timing, and narrative flow for a cohesive final product.
Procedural landscapes in Houdini involve using node-based workflows to generate detailed, scalable terrains. By manipulating parameters, artists can create complex, natural environments such as mountains, forests, and rivers. Houdini's procedural approach allows for non-destructive edits, enabling quick iterations and real-time adjustments to terrain elements while maintaining artistic control.
Procedural Landscape
Creating the original graphic novel painted style post-process effect in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) involves applying custom shaders and materials that mimic the hand-painted, stylized aesthetic of graphic novels. By adjusting lighting, edge detection, and color grading, artists can achieve a dynamic, illustrated look, bringing scenes to life with bold strokes, high contrast, and vivid colors, enhancing the comic-like visual narrative.
Post Process Effect
This production pipeline combines various tools for a streamlined workflow. Blender handles modeling, rigging, and animation, creating dynamic 3D assets. Houdini generates procedural landscapes, producing vast, detailed environments with ease. In Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), rendering brings everything together, while post-process effects add stylistic enhancements, such as graphic novel-inspired visuals. Lastly, Adobe Premiere (PR) is used for editing and sound integration, ensuring a polished final output with smooth transitions, timing, and audio synchronization for a cohesive project.