Happy to help anyone out with graphics (models or vfx, I'm not doing animation if I don't need to, you can find another fool for that), although I'm on apple so no Unreal please, want my stuff to be future proof.

Slowly getting back into doing stuff myself, am working on a documentary with Bas who's doing that for a friend he's worked with before. Pretty cool stuff, will be realtime visuals of possible climate change scenarios. It's all super basic so far, but hopefully I can keep the momentum up and work on small personal projects again.

That's cool.

Yeah, should've said, very impressive.

Nice work Liv.
Prob stupid question but does that 'weeks work'include much modelling or is that all built with existing assets?

@Ram
That includes modelling however there are a fair few stock/library assets in there. Its the way the industry has gone. More than anything time was saved with using Megascans textures which are amazing and free to use in Unreal. Although that week does involve design and concept process. I had no brief for this and while influenced by some images of other cabin type things its not a direct translation of anything that exists.
I have a bit of a trial and error approach to that, for example the dark and light finishes were inverted at one stage.

@Ace
You can walk around, well fly around because I havent put a proper fps actor in yet. Framerate can be a little choppy in places maybe dropping to 25fps but I have done zero optimisation.
Thats running on my PC which is i7, 32gb ram, 1080TI.

Cheers Tempy.

The lodge itself is all modelled by me including the interior the mezzanine bit and counters. The furniture and fittings are a mix of stuff I made and stuff off CGTrader and 3dSky with some modification and rebuilding of shaders in Unreal.

Shaders are a mix as well. The wood of the Lodge and a bunch of other bits are basic shaders built by me. I recommend picking up Crazybump, its a bit of very homebrew looking software but amazing for converting bitmaps used for diffuse into normal, displacement and reflect maps. I think its £40 but money well spent and I've seen it mentioned in interviews with people from massive studios in games and film.
Then a few Megascans shaders like the slate roof and objects like small foliage and rocks.

Other shaders came from Megascans. The landscape was interesting. I sculpted that using the landscape tools then used 4 Megascans shaders simplified a bit (as the paint only allows for 16 bitmaps total). I really enjoyed painting the landscape, blocking it out first then going back in after placing objects.
The trees are from Epic Marketplace. I hand placed those rather than using any sort of random scatter as it meant I could control how they framed other parts of the scene.

In terms of making stuff from scratch I think it is good to know so you can make what you cant find or modify what isnt quite right. Also if you want to go into the world of big studios then that is a job in of itself.

As I'm generally focussed on delivering and end to end thing on my own librarys of stock stuff are essential or I would never get anywhere. That being said I try to have a good understanding of everything I put in. Most things and especially furniture and the like I could make its just not worth doing if someone else has.

Wait, WHAT?! Is Unreal free to use like Unity etc?! Is that recent? I always thought there was a big licensing cost barrier even to download the tools and create stuff.

How long for a novice to get up and running designing an environment?

If you're using pre-build Unreal store free assets you could knock something up pretty quickly. If you want to design stuff to your own spec, you're gonna need to learn a fair bit lot. If you're got the time to dedicate... a very busy month or two? That's what it took for me to go from nothing to my kitchen in 3DS Max.

Does anybody have any experience with Niagara?

Did you manage to get your emitter set up?

Don't ask him about his particle spawn group for God's sake.

Last week I picked up a project using Unity.
I figured I knew Unreal well enough now that it cant be that different.
Never again.

Unity isnt that different really, except for things are bodged together, plugins becoming features that piggy back of old systems. Then just loads of random crap going wrong for no apparent reason. Textures loading in the wrong gamma, or not at all. Objects randomly baking black. Imported meshes losing data when reimported.

Just a horrible and stressful experience all round. Its probably great for hard coding but coming at it from an art angle I cant stand it. Ugly as fuck UI as well.

So for some positive here is something I did in Unreal as a pitch that still might or might not happen. Please dont share anywhere else not that anyone would (especially Dante as I think he works for the client)

I made everything here and coded the actions using blueprint. The exploding washing machine animation is triggered by a key press and the laptop can be picked up and fully rotated. Nothing ground breaking but I was pretty happy with it. I would have smashed my computer up before getting this far in Unity.

We use unity at work, is so shit, me and another guy knocked up a tech demo in a morning using some unreal tools that blew the fuck outta the unity stuff we produce and the guy who keeps pushing shitty unity because it's free compared to the fees we *might* have to pay on unreal depending on how much work we did with it was fucking mad salty for days and now goes around taking everyone it would take 6 months to redo all their current unity stuff in unreal lol. Babyman.