This was a type of (literal) test-bench scene I was doing back in the Early Access phase of Unreal Engine 5 a few years ago – mostly with the aim of testing out the different new features that UE5 had to offer and then later on, figuring out what had changed or which bugs had been fixed which each new version of the engine.
In particular, 5.6 introduced a new form of ray traced translucency through the Lumen hardware ray tracing pipeline – which wow – really makes a big difference and makes very challenging scenes like this even possible without path tracing at all.
Although it has to be said that it also seemed to cause some weirdness with Niagara systems, with collision and rendering, both with translucent and non-translucent mesh renderers…? Granted I was using cpu-based ray tracing collisions? Hopefully just a bug with how the pipeline works…
Rendered out in Unreal Engine 5.6.1 on an Nvidia RTX 3090 using Nanite for most meshes, Lumen for GI and reflections and a combination of Megascans, Blender modelled & textured assets, and third-party assets.
These aquarium projects of yours are easily one of my favorites on the forums. They’ve evolved alongside Unreal and showcase the newest tech in the most beautiful way (especially those upgraded fish!)
the water droplets ripples are so satisfying, great job, honestly would love to see a version without the music, it’d make for a great background shooting video IMO
Hello @LTowers95! Welcome to posting with us here on the forums!
I must admit that I have watched this multiple times and have used it to help me relax during my daily reading time. The audio is perfect and the visuals are gorgeous. The drops on the side of the glass and light bases really add depth. The table, being aged and slightly water-damaged, shows a lot of character too, even though this seems to be in the corner of an unknown space.
It has this calming, cozy feel to i,t and the realism is phenomenal. I might’ve missed it when reading over your posting, but how long did this take?
@The_M0ss_Man Thank you so much! And this whole scene took about 3-4 days to put together? I had to model the tank in such a way that UE’s translucency didn’t freak out about it - separate meshes for the front and back of each glass pane + the water behind.
The rest of the time was spent trying to figure out the new lumen ray-traced translucency - mostly pretty good although as I was using nanite for the meshes inside the tank as well, I had to bring out the old “r.RayTracing.Nanite.Mode 1” to get them not tracing on the proxy meshes… And some weird stuff with the niagara systems behind the glass too - with the fish? I think it was because I was using ray-traced CPU traces for the collision, so maybe it was causing some overlap with how the translucency was being calculated??
But yeah, a few days here and there to assemble this - most of the time is actually spent troubleshooting lol - but that’s kinda why I make these scenes to begin with - better to stress test and figure out issues now in a smaller scale, than wait until I run into issues in a big client project lol.
This is the probably the most beatuifuil thigh i’ve ever seen in game development, crazy cool wow wow !!! That Jazz music is really on its place in every millisecond. Go Go Aquarium!!!
