The Hinterlands Pt. 3 - Dragon Age Inquisition in Unreal Engine 5 - A Cinematic Demo

And so here we have the third and final part of the Hinterlands I’ll be doing for this series – as anyone who’s ever played DAI will know – at some point you must ‘Get thee out of the Hinterlands’ – seriously, the game is huge – it’s not an all-Hinterlands-all-the-time fest.

Some of you in the comments rightly pointed out that Ferelden at this point is still recovering from the Blight – so a little extra grunge is maybe warranted – everything kind of looks scraggly and slightly sickly – fair enough for a Blight, right?

Onto other parts of the scene: particle systems ahoy! The fire and the smoke are still Cascade I’m afraid – still getting around to mastering Niagara – but they seem to still work OK – shockingly efficient by the way – I kind of expected all of these particle systems to tank my FPS, but no – Unreal was chugging along fine.

Playing with the atmospherics here – dust, soot and ash would realistically be flooding the air around this place, so it affects the volumetric lighting of the scene, turning more red and brown – but I didn’t want to make everything grey and dark either – so sort of a compromise here – still that bright morning light, but overall … grittier as if … well, everything was on fire. Which it is. I feel like as I'm doing these cinematics, I'm appreciating Nanite and Lumen more and more - especially Lumen. Doing look dev for a scene like this is now so simple without light bakes - it's definitely such a freeing thing for an artist to work with.

Music was ‘Forest of Fear’ – Aakash Gandhi – kind of sounded similar to the DAI soundtracks actually…