Unreal Engine 5 Scene

Unreal Engine 5 Scene

01 INTRODUCTION

RESEARCH

The goal was to create a scene using Unreal Engine 5. Applying something new with our own research. I went with a barn in the woods that ends with a dragon animation.

Everything will be explained in this document how I added/learned the new subject matter and how this scene evolved over time.

02 NEW SUBJECT MATTER

DUST PARTICLES

RESEARCH

The sun is shining through the roof of the barn creating light rays. Since my barn is filled with hay, i wanted some particles floating in that particular light.

I created a new Niagara Emit￾ter, an empty one. 

It gave me a node where I can set the size, color, behavior, quantity, etc...

Color

The particle is set to orange/yellow to mimic a hay particle and match with the lighting of the scene.

Behavior

The behavior of the particle was set really slow, so it flows in the scene like a thin, feather￾weight hay particle.

Size

Small

ANIMATED COBWEBS

To emphasize the barn being abandoned I wanted to create some simple cobwebs. Cobwebs are light and thin so they need to catch wind and dangle

With this material system that has been created, you’re able to put any black and white cobweb picture into this material and give it the perfect look in your scene.

Color

For the color I used just a color node wich will give white as an output.

Opacity

Used a black and white picture of cobweb.

The cobweb was white, thats all i needed, I used a remap value node to make it more transparant since cobwebs are really thin.

Animation

There is a node called “simpleGrassWind” wich allows you to put values into “windspeed”,”windweight”, “windintensity”,..

I put constants into those functions with values that brought me close to what it would look like in real life.

IMPORTING ANIMATIONS

Introduction

The dragon animation had to be imported into Unreal wich gave me a lot of problems.

I tried a few possibilities importing this animated maya scene to UE5.

The rig I used is created by CgTruong.

First I animated the rig in Maya and made a dragon landing.

Then it was time to look into exporting this animation to UE5.

Options:

- Exporting fbx: As soon as this animation was ready I selected the model and exported as an FBX with animation enabled.

But when I imported the FBX, the mesh was broken and there was a failure with exporting the animation .

After some problem solving on the internet I could not seem to find a solution with the problem I had.

-Exporting Alembic: An alembic export will not look at how the rig moves the mesh, it will look at the movement of the geometry so i exported my model as an alembic.

Now I ended up with an animation without a rig, just moving geometry.

I tested the alembic in a new Maya file and everything worked.

I imported the alembic to Unreal Engine 5 and everything looked fine. The mesh itself was not broken but the animation was only playing when you press the “Play” button.

So i had to find a way that my animation was playing in my viewport as well.

This picture above shows a couple settings of the fbx. One of them is Start Time Offset.

It plays the animation while you change the value of the slider.

So i put a key on “0.0” on the timeslider and a key on “4.3”.

The animation was fully played within these values.

So now i could choose whenever the dragon was landing and in wich shot.

FINAL WORD

I put so much of personality in this project. I played the music myself, on my own guitar wich I also 3D scanned to put in my scene.

Although I have much to learn in this software. I’m proud of what I delivered and I’m definitly going to make more Unreal Engine projects.

Maarten Leys

Special thanks to

Wout Bosschaert