Shaping Peaceful Volcanic Environment With Unreal Engine 5 & Houdini

Who am I?

My name is Marco, and I'm a self-taught artist specializing in Unreal Engine and VFX compositing.

Before discovering this world, I studied graphic design and communication, but a little over a year ago, I learned about Nuke, and since then, I've been studying it passionately. About six months ago, I also started working with Unreal Engine, combining the potential of real-time with compositing to create cinematic scenes.

Inspiration & References

For this project, I was inspired by the volcanic landscapes of East Africa, particularly Tanzania. I studied several images and references of volcanic areas such as Ol Doinyo Lengai, the national parks, and areas like Ngorongoro. 

What did I use to create Before The Storm?

For this project, I used a combination of software that allowed me to cover every production stage. I started in Houdini, creating the terrain using Height Fields and later generating an HDA.

Inside Unreal Engine, I took care of the set dressing, lighting, and building the overall atmosphere. The assets used mainly come from Quixel Megascans, along with other models found online.

For the final stage, I did the compositing in Nuke and finally relied on DaVinci Resolve for color correction and video editing. 

Houdini – Creating the Masks

The most important part of this work was undoubtedly creating the volcano and importing it into Unreal Engine.

I created several masks in Houdini to manage the landscape material, including those for flow, debris, and sediment. These masks allowed me to separate the different areas of the volcano, such as rock, rubble, and vegetation, making the texturing process in Unreal much easier.

Once the model was exported, I applied the masks in Unreal, creating a landscape material that allowed me to assign specific textures to each landscape area. I used the Paint Layer system in the Landscape section of Unreal to handle the blending and associate each mask with the corresponding layer.

Lighting – The Atmosphere Process

To enhance the atmosphere, I worked with soft and warm lighting, aiming to evoke a sense of apparent calm.

I was interested in creating a visual contrast between this warm light and a cold sky. Lighting plays a fundamental role in this balance: I tried to maintain a delicate palette, with an almost sunset-like light, to suggest both beauty and tension at the same time. 

Ground Material – Nanite Displacement in Unreal Engine

For the foreground terrain, I created a material using Nanite Displacement and Vertex Painting in Unreal Engine. This allowed for exceptional customization, blending, and a higher level of detail, achieving the muddy consistency and variation I was looking for.

Below, I'm sharing a material showcase to demonstrate how it works:

Compositing

For the compositing phase, once I obtained the render in Lumen, I added custom passes for depth, motion vectors, and ID. 

These passes allowed me to use Cryptomatte for precise element selection. Thanks to this, I was able to perform a sky replacement in Nuke, adding clouds and birds that I had rendered as stencil layers in Unreal Engine.

Since the birds are small elements, they risked getting lost in the image, and it would have been difficult to extract them in post-production without this approach. In addition, I added atmosphere, haze, glow, color correction, focus, chromatic aberration, light lens FX, vignette, and distortion to enhance realism and improve the overall visual quality of the scene. 

You can find me on LinkedIn and ArtStation to stay updated on my upcoming work.

Marco Amati, Unreal Engine Artist