Presentation Video: UE5 Living Room Presentation - YouTube
Breakdown Video: UE5 Living Room Breakdown - YouTube
Hey everyone! I’m excited to share today my latest personal project done in Unreal 5.1!
This project is a spin-off of a larger one that Mick and I have been working on for the last few years - a live-action short film called “Sim” which has a lot of digital environments. My initial plan was to use Maya/Arnold to finish it, but now I have the confidence that the digital set extensions will look much better in Unreal. Not only because of the photorealism quality, but also because it is so much easier to manage the project than Maya. Plus, the assets available at Epic’s Marketplace also helped to build the scene better.
I use this personal project basically to practice my photorealistic interior lighting skills and to make sure I could reach the same quality that I was getting with Arnold before fully migrating the short-film project into Unreal. A lot of the props in the scene are free ones from Sketchfab and Epic’s Marketplace. But for a few of them I had to do an extra texture pass in Substance Painter. If I had to model everything myself, it would have taken months to finish it. Check out the page for the full credits and links of all third-party assets that I use.
Of course I would like to stay with this personal project for a lot more weeks. There are a few issues and bugs that I did not have time to fix, but I need to move on to other things. I learned a lot doing this exercise, I’m sure the next one will look much better!
Overall I was responsible for all the scene assembly; character poses; lookdev and lighting. I also create most of the assets, such as the walls, window, most of the furniture, and also a few of the props. I would also like to thank Mick Abela for all the advice and suggestions about the cinematography, Composition and Colours of the scene.
Hope you guys like it! Until the next one! 
