Just adding some progress renders showing the evolution of the project.
As my computer was suffering running UE, I did a lot of renders to see what the final version looked like.
Before I hit Unreal, I gave myself some days to think about a few project ideas and after careful deliberation based on the scope, my skills and my laptop power, I settled for an idea representative of my situation: someone working at night and rendering with Unreal Engine.
The first steps were working on the base scene, the composition and the lighting:
Then adding to adding some basic meshes with the table and some screens, and the character for the scene:
At that point, the composition felt too focused on the wall so I adjusted the view:
I then added the neon sign. The lighting sequence of the sign was at first fully handled within the material, but I later on made separate parameters for each word allowing a greater control in Sequencer:
I really wanted the character to have a glass of hot coffee in their hand, showing that they recently fell asleep and that they were too tired to even drink it. I looked at creating a simple smoke effect and this started a period of a few days just trying to make the smoke work.
I tried the new fluid simulation shipped in UE5 and even though it was showing in the editor, it wasn’t rendering in MRQ.
I tried to export the Niagara Fluid Simulation into a tileset but couldn’t make it look right.
Some strange things were happening with this simulation, as seen here with the strange blueish square
In the end I was able to make it render by deactivating some Raytraced Translucency effects in my PostProcess Volume, and of course the smoke was barely visible in the last render which made this almost a waste of time.
I then decided to replace the computers with old ones to emphasize on the computer dying running Unreal Engine:
I started to add some ambient particles and even though this one came way too strong, I loved the motion blur effect. I thought a lot of ways to integrate it but decided to scrap it as it wasn’t fitting the theme:
From there I started to play with the mood and the colors in the PostProcess Volume, and started to add more props:
And here is the final image:
Also not very visible in these set of images, I created a shader for the computer screen to look like an old one, and I played with the CPU tower in Sequencer to make it shake and smoke before the computer end up with a blue screen:
Overall I really like the story, I wish it would have taken me less time to figure many things out and to have a more powerful machine to not have to constantly render to set what the final product would look like.
That was a great learning experience though, and I really enjoyed!
Thanks for reading 
