Unreal Engine 5 is an engine that will allow developers to create extensive and realistic open-world environments. However, the latest tech demo focuses on just a small section of a train station to create an incredibly lifelike situation that wouldn’t be too out of place in a horror game.
A photorealistic Unreal Engine 5 tech demo
Since Unreal Engine 5 was made available to all developers last month, we’ve seen more tech demos start to emerge. Spotted by ResetEra, the latest of these was created by Lorenzo Drago. Etchū-daimon Station is based on a real-life train station in Toyama, Japan. The photorealistic demo starts in the seemingly deserted train station on a bright sunny day with a cameraman wandering about the platform. Just over a minute in, though, the demo switches to nighttime in the aftermath of a rainstorm, and the video achieves a far more eerie atmosphere.
For those who are more technically minded, the environment is a high-res render running at around 7 frames per second. The artist provided a more detailed description of how he produced the demo:
I worked on all modeling, texturing, lighting and animation. Foliage is from Quixel Megascans. The environment is running in Unreal Engine 5, lit with Lumen. I didn’t use Nanite, so models are created using the standard low-poly workflow. For this project, I wanted to get as close to photorealism as possible. I used camera matching to get accurate proportions and made careful use of reference. I adjusted the measurements afterwards to help with modularity.
Aside from detail textures and alphas created from photographs, I created all textures from scratch in Painter and made custom materials in Unreal for use with vertex painting or masks to break up repetition.
To shoot the video, I used real-time VR tracking to emulate a handheld camera and flashlight.
In other news, Babylon Fall’s Steam player count sunk to just a single player last week, and the PS5 and PS4 versions don’t seem to be faring much better. Elsewhere, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is expected to be revealed in June.
