Neon Street | Environment Art and Realtime Cinematic using Unreal Engine 5

Thought I would share my recent Unreal Engine 5 project and may be get a chance to get featured in an Unreal Engine live stream :sweat_smile:

This project was quite an old idea of mine which was initially planned to make use of UE4. The scope of it was to have a Japanese styled theme which has lots of neon signs and display board. Keeping that in mind, I was never satisfied by the render results as you can imagine emissive materials would not contribute towards lighting the scene and I was not willing to use baked lighting or path tracer.

With the release of UE5, Lumen worked like a miracle for this specific project as all the the emissive material works amazingly towards global illumination as I had in mind initially. not to mention how fast and easy to render Lumen GI is compare to Ray Tracing. Absolutely loved working on this in UE5.

Moreover, the most time consuming part was modelling and texturing the assets. They all make use of UDIM textures and texture streaming which again, was very convenient and time saving. Also, Quixel assets surely deserves the appreciation.

Looking back, my only regret I would say is I was not able to render the movie in the best quality due to my hardware limitations but was able to render some good still renders.
Check out this ArtSation post for the still renders.

I hope everyone likes it.

Thanks for hearing me out!

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