Nuclear Fusion Project Gone Bad

Description: The year was 1958. The Better Light Nuclear Fusion project was launched with fan fare and touted to be the solution to the coming energy crisis. Protesters lined the hillside as the project began, warning of the environmental damage a project of this magnitude would cause. Their cries were ignored, the project continued. Scientists from all over the world came to develop the Fusion Reactor and the thousands of computers to run it. Everything was going fine, they were on the cusp of greatness. Then, one day…they were all gone. The scientists and workers vanished leaving only messages behind. The Better Light Nuclear Fusion Project promised “Better Light Than Ever!” but as the graffiti on sign says, that was to be never. Was it the environmentalists that took the Scientists out? Or was it something far more insidious?

As soon as I saw this challenge go up I did a little thumbnail sketch of a indoor/outdoor cave type environment. Originally I was going to make it like a kind of giant Terrarium with Bioluminescent plants and algae (Avatarish). I ended up not using that concept. As I modeled the cave in Blender I had another Idea so I looked up Fusion Reactors and found a couple of cool reference photos. From there I evolved the idea into a abandoned Nuclear Plant with a mystery surrounding it. I modeled the Circular Fusion Reactor, Light Shafts, Computers, table, Signs, hanging lights, tubes, ducts, cloths, sand build-up, and Computer Cabinets in Blender. I textured them in Substance Painter. I used Vertex Painting and color ID maps in Blender so I could mask several textures onto one texture file. Each asset is textured in 4K with a Base Color, Roughness and Normal (Metallic as well in one or two cases). I knew I wanted emissive algae covered rocks and nuclear waste too, so I made some custom materials and textures for those. I also exported some of the Quixel Rock Textures to create emissive textures for the glowing spots on the rocks (rather than decals).

I wanted to try and recreate indoor, outdoor, bioluminescence, emissive waste and incandescent lighting. I used emissive textures, point lights, bloom and Ultra Dynamic Sky System to create the lighting. I also knew I wanted to do the whole thing in a oner, or continuous shot. I thought the cave would be good to test all that out. Kind of inspired by the original UE5 release trailer. I modeled the cave much too long for the 30 second time limit so the video stops in the middle chamber. The last chamber is huge and I just ignored it once I realized getting there would make the camera move to fast. I created a camera based on the Alexa 65, sensor size 54.12x25.59. I used a 26mm lens for the shot. I wanted everything to be somewhat in focus so I kept the f-Stop (T-Stop) around 5.6-10. For sharpening the image a little bit I used the Local Exposure Detail setting in the Post Process volume. I played with the MRQ quite a bit too get a descent render. I ran into an issue with the Cloth Physics and the MRQ. When I rendered my shot the Cloth just exploded and imploded over and over…it did not flow. I tried everything to get it to work. I finally found a thread on the forum and it said to set the camera and PP Volume motion blur setting to 1. Once I did that it solved the problem…but…when I tried to do a high quality render with Temporal Anti-Aliasing set to 64, some of the cloth froze up and some acted odd. I ended up doing the render at 4096x2048 in ProRes 4444XQ with no Anti Aliasing because I liked the cloth movement and didn’t want to ditch it.

I enjoyed using the in-engine modeling tools in UE5 too. The sculpting, UV unwrap are both great as well as the re-mesh tools!

I hope you enjoy my submission. I love working in Unreal Engine, this project was super fun and made me do some things I probably wouldn’t have tried otherwise. I learned a lot. Thanks Unreal Engine/Epic for everything!!