As a way to begin learning more about Unreal Engine 5.1 and its growing abilities in the art + rendering scene, I put together this scene, showing the story of a common mine coming across something spectacular.
This project was a great way to force myself to really understand global illumination, kitbash, and set dressing – but none of that is really what I set out to do. While working on Wavy Sheets, I was really hitting a wall with render time and was investigating the workflow of modeling in CInema 4D and rendering in Unreal Engine 5.
I was not especially successful, and I'm not sure that is a good approach to rely on in future, but I ended up enjoying the process and workflow so much I just used the native tools and Megascans library and went wild, building just for its own sake.