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Type: Public Screening / Cultural Media Release

Role: Technical Director / Lead 3D Artist

Discovering the Myths of Fengdu
Digital Cultural Storytelling (2024)

Discovering the Myths of Fengdu is a hybrid live-action and CG short film that presents Fengdu as a place shaped by both underworld mythology and contemporary urban life. Roughly one-fifth of the runtime consists of fully animated sequences, while the remaining sections use on-location footage to show the city’s current appearance, landscapes, festivals, and everyday scenes. The CG portion focuses on iconic elements such as Meng Po’s soup, the Naihe Bridge, and key moments from the story of Huaguang saving his mother, establishing the mythic frame through which viewers later encounter the real city.

Fengdu - Ghost City

Fengdu, located along the Yangtze River, is widely known as the “Ghost City” for its long-standing traditions of folk belief and underworld storytelling. Over centuries, the area has developed a layered mythology shaped by Taoist and Buddhist ideas as well as local legends shared through rituals, opera, and popular narratives.

Today, these stories also serve as a cultural language for place-making—linking inherited symbols of judgment, crossings, and moral order with Fengdu’s public identity, and offering a highly recognizable framework for communicating regional memory to a broad audience.

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Mythic Motifs

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Huaguang Saves His Mother (华光救母)

A widely circulated folk tale in which Huaguang undertakes a perilous journey to rescue his mother from the underworld. The story centers on devotion and courage, framing the underworld not only as a place of punishment, but also as a realm where love and resolve are tested.

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Meng Po’s Soup (孟婆汤)

A legendary potion offered at the threshold of the afterlife, said to erase memories of one’s previous life before reincarnation. In Fengdu’s underworld lore, it represents the final act of letting go—forgetting attachments, regrets, and earthly ties.

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Naihe Bridge (奈何桥)

A fabled bridge that souls must cross on their way through the underworld. It is often described as a boundary between the living world and the next, marking an irreversible passage where judgment and fate unfold beyond the crossing.

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Narrative Structure

Mythic and contemporary material are arranged in sequence rather than intercut. The film opens with the CG underworld, introducing Meng Po, the Naihe Bridge, and Huaguang’s rescue in a stylized, self-contained section. Once this narrative and its visual language are established, the film shifts into live-action footage that shows Fengdu’s present-day development, surrounding landforms, temple fairs, festival celebrations, local communities, and food culture. This structure invites viewers to carry the earlier mythic imagery with them as they watch the contemporary scenes, reading the current city against the background of the stories and symbols that have long been attached to Fengdu.

Key frames from the short film — CG mythic sequences and live-action plates, shown with representative lighting/atmosphere passes to illustrate the visual range and narrative transitions

Production Pipeline

This project follows a modular pipeline built around a Houdini-to-Unreal workflow, with assets and look development prepared upstream and final integration completed in compositing.

  • ZBrush: sculpt hero elements and high-frequency details for key props and set pieces.

  • Substance: author PBR materials and texture sets to support consistent surface response in real-time lighting.

  • Photoshop: refine textures, create masks, and prepare 2D elements used across shading and compositing.

  • Quixel Megascans (Bridge): source environment assets and surface details to accelerate scene dressing and grounding realism.

  • Houdini: build procedural setups and VFX layers (atmosphere, motion systems, and simulation-driven passes), exporting optimized elements for real-time use.

  • Unreal Engine: assemble shots, iterate lighting and camera timing, and render real-time outputs for rapid look and pacing decisions.

  • Nuke: composite CG shots, refine integration across passes, and finalize color and contrast through a real-time Unreal-to-Nuke workflow.

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Production pipeline overview — assets → FX → real-time render → comp/grade

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