AZUL Production blog
The ‘Neo Serf’
The idea here is that the gig economy work is a race to the bottom. In the future, gig economy incomes will continue to shrink, with gig workers being forced to work for several different apps on multiple smartphones. For millions around the world who rely on this type of employment, a smartphone is not a luxury item, but an economic necessisity. A sweatshop in your pocket. Here we explore Octavio’s work uniform. A blend of digital utilitarinism, rótulos-style app icons and Octavio’s own personal style.
Drone balloons in UE4
After spending some time laying out UVs and UDIMs, Artur and Damien moved on to testing out realtime GI, refletions, transperancies, volumetrics and raytraced soft shadows in UE4. More optimzations to follow, but these tests are very promising.
Drone balloons
We’re modeling everything in Blender because A) Blender is free and B) we’ve also figured out a solid pipeline from Blender into Unreal. You can tell Artur and Damien are pros by their perfectly laid out UDIMs.
Props
There are dozens of unique props in Azul. Each one needs to be designed, engineered and then fabricated from scratch. We’re really lucky to be working with the master prop builder Rick Gamez. One of the hilights of the pre-production process has been to visit Rick at his workshop and talk about the wide array of cool gadgets at his disposal. Rick has over 40 years of prop-building experience, having made thousands of props for movies like “12 Monkeys”, “Face/Off”, “Men in Black” and most recently “The Tomorrow War”. Here’s Rick doing some laser cutting for “Azul”.
Location scouting remotely
Using Google Streetview to screenshot images for concept work led some interesting finds. Here are a few.
