The Fallow Mire was always a very interesting level from a lighting standpoint – very dramatic and moody atmosphere – and that giant moon hanging low in the sky gave quite an imposing effect.
This is for my ‘Thedas Magic Mystery World Tour’ where I’m re-creating ... spiritual re-imaginings in the form of little cinematics from the game Dragon Age: Inquisition (originally Frostbite 3) in Unreal Engine 5! Mostly because it’s a more fun way of learning UE5 and getting the hang of the new features like Lumen and Nanite.
This scene started to incorporate a lot of other more complex elements like the rain and the water ripples, along with more emphasis on the exponential height fog to capture a more artistic lighting environment. A combination of self-modelled and third-party assets were used, along with some Quixel Megascans for the ground and the trees.
The rain was a Niagara system using a physical mesh-based raindrop – expensive, but turned out pretty nicely for that spitting rain effect. The water was simulated in Blender using dynamic paint vertex displacement and then bought into Unreal Engine 5 using alembic geometry cache.
Extensive use of nanite here – although lumen was having a bit of trouble with the darker-lit areas of the scene – so some supplementing with point/rect lights were necessary in some cases, along with cranking up the indirect light bounces for the directional light.
The moon was actually a nanite physical UV sphere with an emission shader – this allowed very fine control of the positioning and framing of the scene, while also allowing the sky atmosphere to react to the moon in 3D space. The clouds and fog were simply animated texture cards.
