'Thomas & Friends: Wonders of Sodor' Environment VFX - Dovetail Games

I got to live out a childhood Thomas The Tank Engine fan's dream and work on Thomas & Friends: Wonders of Sodor. I created some environment VFX with birds and butterflies. Given the cost limitations of the game engine I had to make sure these were highly optimised.

I modelled a low poly bird in 3ds Max, and used a small plane for the butterflies, added vertex paint in Blender (I found to have better animation results with Blender's vertex colour) and used shader maths in Unreal Engine to animate the wings. The flight behaviour was generated using Niagara particles.