Project Waypoint (Scenes + Original Score)

Hi Everyone,

This will be my WIP thread for a something new I’ve been working on over the past few months - Project Waypoint. The idea is that I create myself some fun scenes in UE4 and then add an original score/soundtrack using my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) of choice, FL Studio.

I’ve been learning some of the basics of UE4 over the past few months and it’s been a ton of fun. Below are my first two ‘proof of concept’ projects. The first is sort of a dead alien world with an entirely ambient soundtrack. The idea was to try and match the ambient music to the scene as much as I could - certainly far from perfect, but it was a start. The second was my first attempt at something that included foliage and an actual living landscape, along with adding a giant planet in the background (originally I had it rotating fast enough that you could see it, but then my wife told me that was unrealistic so I slowed it down way too much #regrets). The soundtrack was again just some generic ambiance.

My first ‘tryhard’ scene was a space scene with a planet, some asteroids and copious amounts of space fog to get that juicy volumetric lighting. I mostly used assets from the Space Essential Pack along with an Asteroid Ring Blueprint. Obviously, I used some assets from UE4’s free projects, namely the fog/clouds from the Mountain Landscape project.

The soundtrack was an attempt at writing and developing musical themes as well as playing around with traditional sci-fi sounds (i.e. Mass Effect, Stellaris, EVE Online, etc.). There are two primary themes in this piece - the planet theme and explorer theme. I introduced both independently and then tried to develop them and weave them together. There’s a lot of progress to be made, and I don’t love some of the developments towards the end, but overall I’m decently happy with how it turned out.

I’ll continue to post different scenes as I complete them. I’ve got two other scenes that are in WIP status at the moment - a magic forest scene with a glowing pool and a lush valley scene with some weird magic altar thing (I made those rings in Blender myself! woo!). See screenshots below:

I’m working on the score for both of these, along with a few other 3d scenes that are still very early in the development. I’ll post them here when they’re complete.

The goal of Project Waypoint is for me to get a lot of practice with scoring different environments so I can improve my composition skills. If you have any passionate thoughts on any of the scenes or music you experience here, feel free to post! I’d love to hear what you have to say about them - the best way to improve is to get others’ feedback!

I’ll be back when I’ve got more to show you all!

look amazing …