Unreal Engine 5’s stunning 3D video can be real too

The video you are about to watch is not cam footage of Etchū-Daimon Train Station in Japan. It’s a video made by 3D artist Lorenzo Drago.

Created in Unreal Engine 5, with lighting from Lumen, Drago says he did “all the modeling, texturing, lighting, and animation” on the clip, except for the foliage you see briefly, which came from Quixel Megascans. This means that he built almost everything himself. The stairs, the walls, the lights, the cables, the works are some handcrafted ornaments and some are photos.

“For this project, I wanted to get as close to the photorealism as possible,” He says. “I used camera matching to get accurate proportions and used the reference carefully. I adjusted the measurements afterwards to help with modularity.”

“Aside from detailed textures and alpha-generated photographs, I created all textures from scratch in Paint and made custom textures in Unreal to use with head paint or masks to break up the repetition.”

While the quality of the space itself is incredible – and took about a month to complete – which helps make everything look and feel fact This is how the camera is used. “To shoot the video, I used real-time VR tracking to simulate a portable camera and flashlight,” Drago says.

be seen? Just…wow. This is the part where I have to remind you that this video was created precisely for this footage only, and so we cannot and should not expect this level of accuracy in our actual games anytime soon. But still.

Let’s finish with some trivia. First, this video was not captured in real time. It can be done, Drago says, but “the image quality is worse,” so this is a high-resolution display captured at 7 frames per second. And if you were wondering, it did on an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with RTX 2080.