Gaea, Unreal Engine 5.4, Adobe Premiere Pro
Surrounded By Stars
Scroll ↓
I created this environment while learning about Unreal Engine. It’s a pretty comprehensive level, using Procedurally Generated foliage and objects based on a ground textures.
When I was satisfied, I brought it into Unreal and began working on the procedural content graph. I made sure to adjust the bounds on each asset so that they wouldn’t clip into each other.
I used Quixel Black Alder trees and megascans foliage to populate the ground.
Rendering has always been one of my favorite parts of the process, but not so much in night time. It’s a unique challenge to make things visible in the one time of time where things are dark. I did this by adding various spotlights at key points., which, if you look closely, may be visible in the image on the right. Without these lights, the details were too dark to see.
I began by creating the geometry of the mountain range in Gaea, a procedural environment creator. It’s a non-destructive modelling software that uses nodes to create landscapes.
I created a crater-type landscape by using the base shape of a volcano and modifying it.
The final step was lighting and camera movement. For night scenes, I’ve found that things tend to be more blue than in day time. By changing the color of the fog and ‘sun’ (now the moon), I was able to achieve a more believable night. I created the starry sky with a BP_SkySphere, which I modified to add stars.
If I had one nitpick, it would be that the camera shake at the beginning of the render is a bit too much. I wanted to it to be a bit more realistic than a camera on a dolly, but after review, I think I overdid it.
Overall, I’m really happy with how this turned out, and how much I learned about unreal while making it!