In January of 2022, I picked up Unreal Engine with the main goal of trying to determine how easily it could be integrated into my current workflow to create scenes for title sequence and documentary series work. Ultimately, I've discovered that this tool is incredibly powerful, deep, and intuitive for that type of work — and I will be finding ways to use it for projects going forward.

I took a bit of an unorthodox approach to learning by diving right in and trying to recreate photos I found online or that I had taken myself in the past. This presented me with a lot of challenges off the bat, but I quickly realized there are tons of great tutorials and resources all over the place for pretty much anything you want to learn about it. I was able to piece together different bits of knowledge to figure things out, and I'm continuing to learn more every day. The fact that I could get from know working knowledge of Unreal Engine to these results in 30 days has me pretty excited about how far I can push it after a year!

The frames below are some of the scenes and environments I experimented with creating; most are done with Unreal 4.27 in the first month of learning it, but I've also included a more recent 3-hour test I made with Unreal Engine 5.0.

The renders are created with a mix of the Unreal Engine 'Legacy Render Queue' and the plugin 'Movie Render Queue'. The Movie Render Queue has significant benefits, however I used the legacy renderer for many of these exercises since the frames render in real time and I was just trying to move quickly.

I still have a lot to learn about this; but I think it's truly a tool that all motion designers should familiarize themselves with for the future. I feel strongly that it's going to play a very big role in the type of work we'll be handling in the future.