Anime Style Look Development In Unreal Engine 4

I had some free time this weekend to play around with an anime style look in Unreal Engine 4. I had previously created this environment and was curious about the process of integrating a character from the program VRoid Studio.

A topic that interests me within game development is the concept of character generators/creators. Tools that enable us to make characters in a fun way. Where we focus on the creative aspect more then the technical aspect. I’ve had experience with realistic characters but wanted to try something like anime to see what workflows exist in that area.

I’ve seen a lot of great videos showing how to use VRoid studio but for this experiment I wanted to take a try and make an anime style character fit within an Unreal Engine 4 environment. For this experiment I got a VRoid model from the VRoid Hub.

So the main goal was to take an environment I had worked on, take a cool character and try merge them so the character could fit within the world. I thought it came along really well, I spent around 4 hours playing around with this.

Check out this video to see my results and make sure to watch in 1080p.

I found that I had to do a lot of post processing work to make the character and world come together in a way that I was happy with. I ended up using a post processing stack within an Unreal Engine 4 Marketplace asset called Chameleon.

In terms of process and tools I ended up using:

-Unreal Engine 4 for building the environment and world.
-Quixel for gathering assets to populate the environment.
-Blender to handle the VRoid Studio VRM model type, optimise it and then port it into UE4. I recommend checking out cats blender plugin.
-For porting it into UE4 I used a plugin called VRM4U which translates all of the materials exactly how you want, it also ports the hair physics.
-Chameleon post processing stack to apply many different effects to make the character and environment blend together.
-VRoid Hub has some amazing work. Make sure you check the artists intent/wishes with their work, some you can modify and use commercially/freely. Others are purely to look at!
-If you want to create an original character then check out VRoid Studio. You can also modify certain VRoid Hub characters if you want to shortcut/speed up that process.

Keep in mind while doing this I was modifying materials, adjusting the character textures in Krita, using Unreal Engine features such as fog, lighting etc.. to get the exact image I wanted. I find with stylised environments you want to use many effects to get something unique. But regardless of style in any look development style of work you need to go in and work on individual elements, materials, textures, lighting. You won’t get the look you want out of the box, you have to spend time and also try follow what feels right.

For the animation I ended up posing the model for animation retargeting. I just picked an idle I had but obviously you can use much higher quality animation. You can also create animations quite easily in Blender thanks to the cats blender plugin. It makes the bone structure much nicer to work with.

I had a lot of fun doing this and I have no idea what I’ll do with all of this new found knowledge/experience. I have a lot of ideas on how to make it even better but this was a weekend experiment. Who knows! Maybe I’ll make a short anime style game one day and put it on itch.io.

Anyway thank you for checking this out and I hope you got something useful from this post. I’m enjoying working on small projects and posting them on this website. Even if no one reads them it’s an archive of my projects/experiments and my thoughts at the time.

The creator of the model I believe is named Gyota Akamazu. The link is here.