Hi!
In this project, I wanted to showcase the great capabilities of working in Unreal Engine 5.6, specifically:
- Environment building in Unreal Engine using optimized building tools. This allowed me to quickly assemble the environment.
Working with a virtual camera. I used a gimbal to operate the virtual camera for real-time content capture. It's an excellent way to create camera animation. It was an amazing experience — the great feedback really makes you feel like a real camera operator.
After capturing the shots, there’s also a stage of refining the environment, where the scene is fine-tuned according to the camera angles. A special highlight was creating the anamorphic lens flare effect — I really love lens flares, and this work was done entirely within the engine.
- Testing and using the new Shallow Water Simulation system introduced in UE 5.6. It’s still raw and needs further development from the developers, but it's already possible to build quite interesting environments — it brings them to life significantly.
I encountered many issues during the rendering stage — despite the relatively simple scene, I had to do a lot of optimization work because the render time was unrealistically high, and the VRAM load was extremely heavy. Optimization allowed me to complete the render smoothly and with good quality. My advice: think through your environment setup from the beginning and include optimization as part of the build process, otherwise you may face big unpleasant surprises at the rendering stage.
- I also went through the compositing pipeline. I used DaVinci Resolve to bring the image quality as close as possible to cinematic standards. I applied various techniques: added additional lens flare effects using tracking; glow effects, grain, motion blur, added smoothness to the footage, and prepared SFX.
- SFX can also be considered a separate stage of work, since here I also had to additionally animate volume and panning.
I’m very happy with the final result and hope you’ll enjoy it too. Feel free to write if you have any questions.