A mossy, indoor rain garden terrarium, rendered in Unreal Engine 5.
This is a continuation of a project I started last year in Unreal Engine 5 Early Access 1 – mostly as a test bench - a way to trial the features that the new engine provided – like Nanite and Lumen.
Over the past few months, with each iteration of this scene, I’ve tried out many different methods, workflows, techniques and overall, gotten much better at using UE5. I feel like the best way to learn very complex programs like this is just to jump in and try to make something interesting. You might (will!) fail a lot, but that in itself is a pretty important learning experience. And the next one will always be better!
This scene in particular uses Nanite for the meshes, with Lumen for dynamic global illumination and RTX reflections & RTX translucency for well … reflections and translucency. Rendered on an RTX 3060.
A combination of Quixel Megascans, custom assets (modelled and textured in Blender) and Sketchfab assets were used. The water was done in Blender using a dynamic paint vertex displacement and brought into Unreal using the alembic geometry cache. I really want to try out the Niagara fluid simulation system they’ve just released – especially the shallow water sim – which is basically what I’ve been doing in Blender but in-engine! Next time!
Lighting (Clay) Pass
Nanite Triangle Visualisation
