Creating an animated short in UE4?

Hello fellow UE4 fans. I’m working on my thesis project and I plan to utilize UE4 to render out an animated short cartoon around 3 min long.
I’m not savvy in scripting and blueprints, I mainly work with models and animation in 3ds Max, Zbrush and such and I want to use UE4 just as a render platform
as I work alone and I have to finish my project until summer, so I don’t have much time for rendering.
My main question is whether my idea is right.
So I want to build the scenes and animate them in 3ds Max completely and then export it all as fbx and import in UE4 altogether. Set up light and landscape there, put some trees, grass etc, set up camera movement with Matinee and render it all out with a screen capture.
Is this the right course of actions, especially talking about building and animating the whole scene in 3dsMax and transferring it?
I didn’t find any description of the similar process online so I just wonder maybe you know…

I would suggest separating the scene from the characters and each character being it’s own export.

Yes I basically bring some landscapes from World Machine. Then import plants and props from 3ds Max. And then import my animated character sequence by sequences to each scene.

I just wonder if my general workflow is right and I’m not doing it wrong somehow.