Making a Korean Street with Megascans and Unreal Engine 5

Introduction

Hello, my name is Gwanseon Oh. I majored in the Game Department at university. Currently, I work as a Junior Environment Artist for Netmarble Nexus, making a mobile game. I would like to contribute to a PC/Console project someday.

The Road to School Project

I created the Road to School project to participate in a challenge called "Lumen Challenge" held by Epic Games Korea for two weeks. The Lumen Challenge focused on using Lumen and Nanite tools in UE5 and making most of the assets with Megascans and the Marketplace provided by Epic Games. The challenge was to submit videos longer than 30 seconds.

I wanted to create a place called 'Daldongne' in Korea. So, I found related references and picked the stairs as the main reference for this project.

Working with Assets

One of the assets used in this scene that I created is one of the railings on the stairs. The railing was simply modeled and finished with Megascans' tiling texture.

The rest of the scene is constructed with assets from Marketplace and Megascans. The method of selecting an asset is to simply browse the Megascan library, some of them are sometimes given for free for a limited time or distributed for free. I have placed the assets I wanted to fit into this environment and imported everything to Unreal Engine 5. Using the finished assets is useful for level design practice, as you can build an environment simply and quickly.

I placed a lot of foliage and decals manually:

Lumen

The final scene was basically the whole purpose of the Lumen Challenge. I wanted to create a scene where day turns into night, to show how naturally Lumen changes the environment's lighting.

This scene was staged in Sequencer. I created a sequence from the day scene to determine how many seconds are needed for the day to turn into the night. I put the interactive functions (Directional Light, SpotLight, Effect, Lightshaft, PostProcessVolume, VolumetricCloud) into Sequencer when it changes to the night.

You have to hold the key at the starting point for each of these functions one by one, and then hold the key by designating the state at night. Many functions change to suit the environment, play sequences, hold keys, and repeat. If you modify it, you will be able to create the real-time environment change you want, If you understand how the various functions of various lights and effects such as Directional Lights and PostProcessVolumes work, this will be easy.

Conclusion

UE5 has powerful features called Nanite and Lumen, as you know. I joined the challenge because I really wanted to experience them. Nanite and Lumen are really nice features and make the job easier, please try them in your working process.

Using ready-made assets helps a lot in practicing level design. It enables artists to implement concept ideas faster and work more efficiently. However, since the assets are limited, it is sometimes good to approach Megascans assets from various aspects, re-texturing or combining existing assets to create new ones.

Thank you for checking out my work and reading the interview until the end.

Gwanseon Oh, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev