Been using Blender for 15 years and am looking to use UE with Electric Dreams awesome work, to create a scenario to make a high resolution image.
I’m helicopter pilot in Medevacs/SAR and looking to create a scenario of an emergency heli, hoisting a rescuer into dense jungle, in adverse weather.Just finished modeling and texturing the heli.
I played with Electric Dreams level, but not sure how to get special lighting/time/weather effect. I’d like to fill some places with brown, dirty water ( not the perfect blue one from the various plugins I saw you YouTube ), apply strong wing in a given direction ( from top to bottom, rotorwash ) to get the trees and foliage blown away, possibly dust haze from downwash as well, play with day time to possibly simulate a night ( but highly exposed under moonlight to see details ) environment with NVG Night Vission Goggles green emissive bulbs, and fill it with jungle fauna …This is my idea right now.
I’d love to learn UE deep later in, properly, but now would appreciate immensely to get good advice, directions, tutorials to get straight to the point quickly.
I’d start with taking a look at any good weather system options you can get from UE marketplace. You’re talking about a ton of really complex effects here and a well-built system you buy will save you a ton of time.
Wind animation and foliage is a whole subject all on its’ own, but that ultimately depends on how Electric dreams implemented its’ wind animation to begin with. I suppose the question starts with ‘what is your time and what is your budget?’
If you’re setting up custom particles specifically spawned by the helicopter, that could take a professional technical artist months. Your absolute best bet as a solo dev is to find the best off-the-shelf systems you can and customize them as well as you can. Otherwise, you’ll need to rig, animate, gameplay program the helicopter, and then do a full VFX pass with systems that are either using a bespoke controller or talking to a ton of interdependent world state systems. Your vision sounds awesome, I would just budget either a couple hundred dollars in FAB purchases or several months (or more) of your time.
Really surprised it’s all that complex and titanesk task. I thought UE was magical sandbox you can basically play with tons of parameters, including weather, off the shelf.
I’ll dig into all what you say today, but at this rate, wouldn’t it be easier to render a custom scene directly into Blender …
The funny thing is, that’s not untrue in certain ways. With how the directional light, sky light, and skyatmosphere interact (plus the new sky plugin), you do get a lot for not that much effort. Lumen GI makes that even more true. And with the new nanite foliage system, your desire to have a dynamic and unified foliage system may come true. It’s just that the system is, in the words of the devs, ‘very experimental’, and if you want a reliable system now, you’ll need to buy or homebrew it.
Unfortunately, powerful doesn’t mean limitless. UE handles atmospherics, direct and indirect lighting, fog, and a ton of other things. It can do a ton, it’s just that the specific systems you want are so specific that each game tends to implement it differently. Time of day and fog is effortless to implement, but helicopter downwash would require a custom VFX pipeline bc so few people would be trying to do anything like it. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression that UE isn’t hugely powerful out of the box, it’s just that particular set of behaviors is very specific.
I think what you are looking for is called Ultra Dynamic Sky. it’s a plugin, not too expensive and does almost everything you are looking for except maybe wind). It’s still a complex tool that has many parameters but is very popular and will get you going quickly.
