Hello everyone ! I want to present my first project made on UE. The main goal was learning but I tried my best to make it look how I wanted. I initially planned to have a Metahuman character interact in the scene but this was a whole other rabbit hole I could spend weeks in, so I decided to keep it simple for now. It was supposed to have wind on all the foliage, it’s setup in the project, but somehow it didn’t work with path tracing rendering and I noticed after a whole night of rendering…
I had a lot of fun making this project, marvelling at the power of Lumen, Nanite, the incredible wealth of resources available for free. Then I discovered that my (new) PC was limiting me a lot so I had to reduce the scale, ambition and visual fidelity. However I still think it’s a decent first step.
I used UE 5.1 with megascans (of course), path tracing to render. Davinci Resolve to color correct, add grain, lens distortion, bloom etc. Pro Tools to do the sound design.
It’s a technical experiment, lacking in story sadly, but I learned a ton. If you have any feedback I’d be happy to hear it.
This scene is incredible! You spared no visual quality within this short cinematic 3D environment; every detail/scene shown was as sharp, crisp, and clean as the last!
Considering this is your first project in the Unreal Engine, the outcome is even more impressive! I am sorry to see there were some limiting factors throughout this experience, though I don’t think your overall design suffered too much from these drawbacks. I’m curious; how long did it take you to complete this project in its entirety?
It took roughly 2 weeks. I was making fast progress at the beginning but I got into texture streaming pool problems, VRAM problems, I almost corrupted my project file by doing something stupid (spoiler - don’t turn on nanite on a mesh that has a single layer water property, I couldn’t even open my file again lol).
So a good portion of the work was actually learning what some of the million settings do in UE !
Looks good. Well done! But close plans are extremely insidious, they are hard to make realistic and beautiful. Look at the stones of the wall at 0:15 they seem blurry and plastic.
The video was liked by its rich colors, accents and the general idea (although it is not so new).
I think if you make footprints on the water and whose giant is barely visible and he walks in the fog between the rocks in the background, then there will be a completely different meaning. You can also make falling rocks into the water in the distance from the rocks when the person came out of the cave.
It is necessary to strive to ensure that your video wants to be reviewed again and again.
Yes you are right, once you look for details it falls apart a little bit. I struggled with performance a lot so I decided to reduce all textures to 4K, normal maps and roughness to 1K, which is probably why it looks this way.
I thought about adding footsteps and rain, but that would have taken forever to figure out and I was already feeling stuck on this project, I wanted to move on. But I’ll try that in the future.
However I may be doing something wrong because I have no idea how they manage to get such high quality on this video and make it playable, my scene was struggling a lot without even making it playable. I have a RTX 3080 and I basically couldn’t work with more details than what you see here, I looked for many performance tutorials to see what I could improve.
I had nanite on of course. It ran better with lumen only but since I wanted path tracing with ray traced shadows, it severely limited my project. I could have stuck with lumen but I wasn’t happy about the reflections on the water.
Your project looks like the start to a grand adventure on an early, overcast morning. The reflections coming from the shallow water are simply stunning imho. Your environment has all the perfect imperfections of appearing as natural formations. No, the rocks aren’t AAA resolution, but they aren’t the hackneyed copy/paste job either.
This is great work considering this is your very first project, and there are so much more glorious things to learn about such a robust engine!
The slender, angled, rectangular cave opening stands curiously unnatural against the environment, but blends in with the mood of the cinematic. Is there a story of inspiration behind this style of cave entrance or was it simply for the sweet, dramatic opening camera shot?
Thank you @Get_DOVAH_it ! There are so many possibilities, and so accessible, it’s a great time to be a creator.
The cave was made in reference to a picture I found while looking for inspiration on pinterest. It’s the entrance of a castle in Switzerland, from what I understand. I found this design so interesting, fitting for a sci-fi/post-apocalyptic vibe that I had in mind.
My original idea was having a character come from the outside into the cave and make it a mysterious hidden base or temple of sorts, that might be for a part 2 !
Thank you for relaying that information, and I’m sorry you ran into so many problems! Even still, you managed to create this lovely short cinematic in only two weeks; that’s pretty impressive to me.
First, congrats on the completion of your first Unreal Engine project! It’s a great journey you’ve begun Secondly, and most importantly, this looks absolutely amazing! From the reflection in the water to the foliage that floats on top of it, this project is incredibly high quality. Beautifully done!
Thanks so much for sharing and I hope to see more of your work around the forums
Hello @PresumptivePanda and thank you ! It’s great to feel welcomed in the UE community as a beginner. Definitely excited about the future of the software.
Thanks It’s not a complex shader at all, I used a single layer water shading model. However I think that was not necessary at all, I could have done it using a simpler approach now that I researched more on this topic
There are so many possibilities, and so accessible, it’s a great time to be a creator.
Secondly, and most importantly, this looks absolutely amazing! From the reflection in the water to the foliage that floats on top of it, this project is incredibly high quality. Beautifully done!