'Override' - Environment Design & Lighting

Created in Unreal Engine 5.

This work was done as part of my course at the 'Unreal Fellowship World Building Program - Winter 2023' hosted by Epic Games. This was a three week intensive live-training program where Epic had 100 of us artists put together with Mentors, Instructors and Epic's Technical Artists mainly focusing on the World Building tools in UE5.
While the program's intent is to bring artists together and learn collaboratively, we were ultimately given a task to come up with a world in the same three weeks. Each of us had to roll a dice that would generate random numbers corresponding to different scenarios of a scene setup (more info down below). This brings the randomness and uniqueness in each of our creations. The setup that's in my work is purely on basis of that.

Watch the clean edit with original renders here - https://youtu.be/Klhnt1dWQRk

Asset Links further down below.

"An alien force takes over a sciene lab facility overriding a machine that's can suck up things into itself and to their cosmic space. They have come with the troops to make sure they have full control of this long abandoned gothic structures."

You can download the image renders here - https://imgur.com/a/GQeAai1

The following image shows the different scenarios that I had to apply to my scene. This is from the random generator that the Epic team used to give us scenarios. The random numbers that I generated is what I can pick from the different columns.

I spent my first week trying a variety of layouts and Midjourney the idea out. I kinda felt uninspired and I couldn't settle on a convicing composition. So, instead of burning out myself I decided to use this first week to prepare and collect assets that I would use. The next two weeks was spent in set dressing, lookdev and lighting.
There were three main things that I created for this project - The ice shader, Niagara Fluids (Tornado) and a geometry script.

Mesh Generation Geometry Script - See the Blueprint here

Followed this video to create auto dynamesh generation through gemetry nodes inside BP. Using this I could spawn ice mesh on top of any selected mesh from viewport. Did not end up using this at final film though.

Ice Shader - See the Material here

I followed this tutorial to create this "fake" volummetric shader. This is such a life-hack to create this effect. The downside to this method is that it doesn't look or work correct in meshes with lots of polygons condensed in a small area, for instance, the nanite meshes from Megascans. This was a huge bummer to me, the shader which looks soo good on the sphere does not work for complex meshes. Due to the deadline constraints, I settled on something that worked okay-ish. I have to figure out a method to achieve the same effect that doesn't rely on mesh normals.

Tornado FX

The Tornado Niagara fluid particle was made having a smoke fluid template within the Unreal content as base. I used a Vector field asset that came with the Engine assets and used that to give the particles a swirly motion. Used curve editors in the Shape Location module to shape out the tornado. Finally, did some variable tweaks in the presets that the base template had and that's basically it.
However, the final look of the tornado in the rendered sequence was disrupted due to the Anti-Aliasing settings in MRQ. The images of the tornado down below show how it is supposed to look. Shoutout to CGHOW's Niagara Tutorials - learnt so much from his channel.

Throughout the course of three weeks, there would be several live training sessions with each one covering a major skillset/tool within the Engine. Along with the training sessions, we also had guest lectures (many talented Unreal folks presenting their journies and what they do with Unreal). We would also have sessions live with Epic's Technical Artists, where we could go one to one and go about all things Unreal wrt the project.

It was an amazing experience, nonetheless. I would like to sincerely thank the whole Epic team - the Managers, Instructors, TAs, Guest Speakers and ofc, all the fellow participants.