Castle Scene

Updated with DSLR colour range and some other neat cinematic tweaks.

So the other day I realized it had been almost a year since I had really touched Unreal. Most of the projects I have been doing my internship with Running With Scissors were in Unity and the new features of Unreal 5 were too good to pass up. This project is kit-bashed from a few sources including Quixel Megascans and Unreal Sensei's assets. I used some of Unreal Sensei's tutorials as well as some official documentation to learn a lot of the new tricks that Unreal 5 has to offer as well as refresh myself on some of the keyboard shortcuts.

The goal of this scene was to take the assets that were used in this tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-zMkzmduqI, and combine them with other Megascan assets to create a lightly fantastical scene. To sort of elevate it slightly as practice. The real focus was to learn Lumen, Unreal 5's new lighting system. I can say wholeheartedly that it is my favorite way to create real time lighting thus far into my career. Going through and seeing all the intricate levels of customization it offers is insane and the end quality is nuts for how little it stresses my GPU. The options within the sky light were also a lot of fun to play with. Plus with Lumens dynamic nature, it was easy to see how it would effect the fog in real time as well as quickly test different sun positions to see which would look best per screenshot.

The rocky crags of the mountain ware made using nanite so that I could render out very high density models closer to the camera without losing framerate or quality. Lesser rocks used nanite as well, but with lower quality models. The foliage was LOD'd during the working phase, but forced to LOD 0 for the screenshots. While the textures included in Megascans are super, they didn't have the look I wanted for my scene and their colour temperatures were all over the place as I was drawing from a few different sets. Thankfully, with a Global Foliage Actor in place and a few tweaks to several albedo overlays this was easily fixed. I then went in and edited some of them further to push the slightly fantastical look of the environment.

The trees were placed using the improved foliage editor. I was once again impressed by how streamlined, yet intricate it was. The ability to move individual foliage assets and edit them while keeping them within the foliage group was very freeing and allowed me to quickly bunch different kinds of plants together more similarly to how they are seen in real life. That was another focus, thinking about where the plants would be in real life and mixing them sparingly to create the sort of plant v plant sunlight war we see in real life.

All of this was going well until my landscape disappeared in a bug so rare I could only find one other report of it. It was finally fixed by changing the LOD several times. Unreal 5 is awesome, but man that scared me.

So there we are, practice scene done, onto something more original coming soon...