Extraterrestrial
A short cinematic made in Unreal Engine 5 featuring Mesh to MetaHuman technology as well as full-body and facial motion capture through budget-friendly methods. The theme, setting, and narrative are inspired by The Rendlesham Incident, the UK's most famous UFO sighting that is shrouded in mystery and government conspiracy.
For Extraterrestrial, I set out to experiment with aspects of Unreal Engine that I had little exposure to so far. During this project, I worked to understand environment design, including the use of landscaping tools, foliage (both painted and procedurally generated), megascans (with Nanite), and texture blending. This project was also an opportunity for me to better understand how to implement and utilise lighting within Unreal, especially with the introduction of its recent Lumen lighting technology.
When deciding the narrative of this project, I initially researched local folklore for stories of fantastical creature sightings and supernatural stories. I stumbled across the Rendlesham Incident: the UK’s most notorious UFO sighting.
The sighting possessed classic signifiers of UFO sightings: lights in the sky, frenzied animals, and mysterious signs and symbols left behind. Furthermore, conspiracies of a cover-up operation by both the UK and US authorities led to further speculation as to the validity of the sighting.
It was an intriguing story with plenty of narrative possibilities. So, I visited Rendlesham Forest for some primary research gathering. Although the Rendlesham Air Force Base did not allow entry to the premises, I was able to glimpse through the fences and wander the surrounding forest.
Visiting the site gave me inspiration for how I would want my scene to look and how I would want my narrative to feel.
For the foliage, I wanted to create a dense forest that would obstruct the line of sight. While painting worked to some degree, I found that instead using a procedural generation volume for the trees resulted in a better-looking forest overall. It also allowed me to isolate the pathway as an area where trees could not spawn, which made the process a little easier.
I added mega scan meshes to the path, particularly across the banks, and this made the path feel more natural and organic, as well as more realistic.
Once I was happy with the trees, I moved back to foliage painting for the smaller plants and grasses. With a small brush size, I painted grass along the path, and small ferns, shrubs, rocks, and logs along the banks.
With some volumetric height fog and appropriate lighting, the scene started to feel much more appealing.
One thing that I noticed while making the environment was that despite how good the mega scan assets looked, they all had different textures with different tones and colours. Although not a big deal, the disconnect between the mega scan meshes and the landscape textures I was using led me to explore ways to combat this.
I discovered virtual texture blending, a process that would allow me to blend the texture of my landscape with my mega scan assets and make them appear more seamless.
I created two virtual textures: one that would react to the height map of the landscape, and the other would match the master material of the mega scan content.
This was also a fantastic opportunity for me to develop my Blueprint skills.