‘Escape’
by Lemon
Video:
Escape by Lemon
Student Submission: Yes
Credits to sourced content:
[SCANS] Lost Temple Cave - Environment Asset Pack
by ‘Scans Factory’ 2020
Ice Climbing Pick - 3D Model
by ‘Loopenkoopen’ 2020
Flare - 3D Model
by ‘FrodoUndead’ 2022
Various Materials
Quixel - Megascans Library
Screenshots:
Description:
While traversing a dark, unexplored cave, a collapse left a lone spelunker helpless. Getting out was not an easy task and using all their remaining equipment, they were finally able to escape from hell. It took what felt like an eternity, but escape is better late than never, right?
Hi! I’m a student living in Australia. I first used Unreal Engine a year ago (only starting to seriously use it for the last 6 months) and honestly, despite encountering many difficulties, this was a lot of fun to do. I’ve also never used UE5 before as I do everything in UE4, so learning what Lumen can do was incredible. The new Niagara fluid sim tech was very cool too but incredibly frustrating to get into the exact way I wanted.
Designing this was a little bit of a challenge. I was instantly drawn towards the idea of a trapped cave explorer whose journey can be found using the environment and the movement of the camera. I wanted to express the slow progression through a dark cave, but of course a dark cave is very hard to see in, so it needed a bright light that would make sense. Considering I also really wanted to experiment with a strong colour aspect, a burning flare creating a red/black colour scheme was really my first and only choice. A design problem I hadn’t anticipated was the maximum length of the video. I wanted to show a slow ascent and make that felt through a slow moving camera, but that isn’t an option when the maximum length is 30 seconds, so I had to cut an additional shot where a flare falls down a dark chasm until its totally consumed by darkness.
In reality, the most difficult aspect was actually rendering the thing. Since I’ve only made games before, I had to learn Movie Render Queue and dealing with constant crashing was very de-motivating, but eventually it worked and here we are.
Engine version:
5.0.2