(The Fallow Mire - 5/02/2022 )
I’d always loved the environments in Dragon Age: Inquisition, so I thought I give it a go to create some cinematics from the concept art and level screenshots of the original game – this time with the full power of Unreal Engine 5! AKA, my "Thedas Magic Mystery World Tour’.
I’ve done two-ish at the moment, and I plan to work my way through every level in the game at least once - time permitting of course.
{The Hinterlands Pt.3, Ferelden )
{The Hinterlands Pt.1, Ferelden )
In full fairness, Dragon Age: Inquisition came out in 2014, so obviously the technology for video game real-time graphics has developed substantially since then – and not to mention that it used an entirely different game engine (Frostbite 3). With that said, obviously the lighting, models etc… aren’t going to match up 100%, and with Nanite and Lumen – the whole look of the original scene isn’t exactly the same – but it wasn’t supposed to be. The aim for this little project was just to re-imagine what DA:I could have looked like with today’s graphical capabilities – to capture the mood and the essence of Bioware’s environment level design.
While this series is in part just for fun in my spare time (and maybe a little DA4 hype), it’s also in many ways a technical demo for the early access of Unreal Engine 5. As such, some of the limitations of Nanite and Lumen are highlighted here – for example Lumen’s current lack of support for translucent materials. Note how the foliage (especially the grass!) can tend to flicker when moving and generally kind of looks odd.
Another unforeseen thing (although not necessarily in a bad way) is how Lumen changes the way you go about lighting scenes. Something you may notice is that the original Frostbite 3 screenshots seem quite a bit darker – whereas even with a similar lighting setup, the Lumen scene is much brighter. Improved global illumination means … improved global illumination. Huh. If you’re used to UE4, it can be a bit of an odd thing at first – having all your scenes be brighter and better lit than normal - even when you’re not necessarily trying to make it so. More realistic, certainly – but different.
{The Crow Fens, Exalted Plains)
For the more technical side of things, most of these scenes were kitbashed together using full quality Nanite Quixel Megascans assets – with the exception of some of the trees and roots (done in Blender Sapling Gen), the basalt columns, the animated water and the mountains in the background. Nanite is great – this level of complexity would never have been possible in UE4 – although as a caveat, at nearly 1GB per model – this scene is HUGE. If this any indication (along with the offical demo) future games done in UE5 are certainly going to be hard on the SSDs.
This scene was 100% dynamic – no light bakes. Just Lumen working its magic. But given that these scenes were running at full quality on the cinematic preset at around 25-30fps on a single 1060 Max-Q, 6GB VRAM – I’m not even too mad. It’s not like I’m running a 3090 here.
The final export was done using the Movie Render Queue – at 2K resolution with temporal sampling bumped up to 32 to get a nice smooth image. So in this regard, it’s not truly ‘real-time’ – as it took around 3 hours to export out the whole sequence – I guess ‘real-time-adjacent’? As a 3D artist mostly using Unreal for animations and client work - I don’t mind - but with a bit (read: any) optimization, that FPS could definitely be bought up to something more reasonable. Final colour grading was done in Davinci Resolve 17.
