Behind the Scenes: Cloud 66 from Blender to Unreal 5 (Patreon)

I fell in love with Unreal Engine 5 recently, in particular with a way I can use it to bring my Blender illustrations to life. I'm exploring this pipeline more and more and I felt it was time for something more substantial, so I took my staple Cloud 66 diesel-punk scene and set myself on a mission to make it alive.

Last time I did this, I was interested in more modular approach, i.e. using Blender as a modeling tool to create these puzzle pieces I could use to build large scale models in Unreal. This time, I was interested in a completely opposite approach. Building the whole scene in Blender and bringing it into game engine.

This way, all the level ideation and variations could be done in a very familiar modeling environment and exported on-the-fly to Unreal.

Visit the full Pinboard here

But again, this wasn't supposed to be 1:1 copy and paste. I wanted to give this a second look and think about, how this would be utilized in game engine. Of course I want to be able to take a walk in my scene, so the first question was, is it traversable?

It could be, but it wasn't optimal. The stairs were in a weird spot and walking between two main platforms was outright impossible. That's why I took a pencil and sketched the whole thing from scratch. Focusing mostly on how to place objects and pathways, so it feels natural to walk.

I came up with a single continuous traversable path involving two sets of stairs and it even opened up the top roof for exploration. 

I decided it would be a great surface to place some seating setup for the visitors of the station alongside some vending machine.

The rest of the scene is mostly the same and if you compared the two with untrained eye, you could easily miss the fact, that the layout is totally changed.

Another thing I did, was to unwrap the models and apply Substance materials to bring the Cloud 66 from the low poly flat shaded realm into reality. Of course, after importing the scene into Unreal, the materials need to be setup again, but Unreal as a Substance plugin too, so it's only a matter of dragging and dropping them on the surfaces. But all the UV's and material slots need to be done in Blender beforehand. So if I need to make a change in the scene, I can easily just update the Blender file and import the FBX to update all the meshes within Unreal and continue the work.

This process only cemented my enthusiasm for Unreal, and what can it bring to the table as a creative tool for illustrators. You don't need to aspire to be a game developer, but the whole world moves towards interactive 3d applications. So the skill to use Blender as a creative tool and the ability to seamlessly bring scenes to life in Unreal will be a huge asset.

Do you know how many steps it takes to enable a 1st person walking in your scene?

Three.

Are you interested in learning Unreal? Tell me :)

You can watch the process video on Youtube