Futuristic Islands
Similar to my Forest level, I have always wanted to create a futuristic city or island of some kind. This project was created to both look nice and also be something that users could explore. This was also inspired by R-Planet, where I had created an environment which used a lot of wood and natural materials. While I ultimately liked the look of R-Planet, I wanted to try using those buildings with different materials and more unique elements, and that was this.
I started by customizing the island mesh from Unreal 5's ArchViz starter. This would help me when it came to creating the roads and would also help me when it came to putting the two buildings that are at the center of each. The first island I created was the one on the right, I used buildings that I had used in R-Planet as well as other ones I really liked and placed them there. I then created a road and lights so the scene would look brighter at night.
While I thought the first island looked good, I wanted to add more to the area and created the second island. The second island featured the large hexagonal building in the middle, which I made, and apartment buildings which I made. The rest of the buildings were towers and other smaller buildings I found. For lighting, I used the same day/night cycle I had in the forest, but I added a system where the materials change to emissive ones and the spot lights turn on at night and turn off in the day. I also used niagara emitters for the beams that appear in the night.
I used the same cinematic camera, played with the settings, and rendered the video above.
