The Elderwoods is an in-progress cinematic I'm working on alongside the Instructors at M3DS Academy. The whole project is made with Unreal Engine 5, from modeling, texturing, lighting, and rendering. It was the first project where we tried to do everything in-engine with its built-in tools. I've been amazed by how many things you can do inside of this software, even if they are not still "industry standard". It's going to be a long time before Unreal is considered an all-in-one tool, but I do see a future where that is the case

This is also the first time I got to play around with Xsens and animate in-engine. Motion capture is definitely something that I'd like to delve into more, and I'm grateful that we have an Xsens motion capture suit that we can play around with on campus at M3DS.
The final cinematic is still in progress and I can't wait to share it with all of you!

Most of the assets were from Quixel's Medieval Game Environment Pack, but I've also done a lot of assets myself. I find it very interesting to try and match someone's style, but I love how my assets fit right into the scene.

For all of the torches, I played around with Niagara Fluid to get a realistic fire. With Unreal Engine 5.4, VDBs are immensely improved and their render times have been almost halved for me

During this project, i learned how to utilize BPPs (Level packed actors) to create prefabs that I can easily fit into my scene afterwards

The final cinematic is still in progress and I can't wait to share it with all of you!