Alley is an investigation into ultra high poly Nanite workflows as well as a continuation of investigation of getting high quality fluids into Unreal.
It is a whopping 11 minutes of smooth closeups of assets entirely created by myself using a Houdini - Substance - Unreal Engine workflow.
Individual assets (eg bricks) range from 5-25 million polys with 3-55 UDIMs & 8K textures each, making the scene upwards of 60 Billion Polygons.
Lit with Hardware Lumen, VSM Shadows & Volumetric Fog in UE5-Main branch of Unreal Engine 5 (5.3.0).
Smoke VDBs are rendered with Thibault Lambert’s fantastic Sparse Volumetrics Plugin (a bleeding edge custom version that requires engine changes)
The largest Fluid cache worked out to be around 33GB so nothing too crazy, this was achieved by only meshing the fluid in Houdini based on the camera frustum.
Wow! I’m amazed at the robustness of your project! Whatever you were investigating, you delivered it and stretched the legs out of UE5!
The opening shot with the slow pan over the grated staircase set the tone for the video. I must remark upon the moment the first raindrops began falling on the pavement. It was quite a vivid display, like drops from a kaleidoscope, as the rain reflected the lighting from the surrounding environment.
I haven’t before seen fluid displayed in such a rich manner. As the rain continued to pour, it was as if the rain was painting the environment with life. The upward views of the cascading torrent looked so strikingly natural.
This was well shot, well executed, well lit, and well built. I’m impressed! Excellent work!
