Jungle Waterfall in UNREAL ENGINE 5 – Forest in a Bottle: A UE5 Cinematic

A cinematic animation of a jungle waterfall in an indoor terrarium, rendered in real-time using Unreal Engine 5. I really enjoyed making that rain garden from my previous video – and I learned a lot about UE5 and the little quirks and tricks with Lumen and Nanite. I also feel that I’ve gotten a more solid grasp of Niagara and what it’s capable of as a particle system...

This jungle scene was definitely a bit of a different vibe – a lot darker and moodier with the lighting setup – a little heavier almost...

A combination of Blender modelled + textured meshes, Quixel Megascans and free online models were used – along with some photoscans from Ian Hubert’s pateron. A Blender mantaflow FLIP simulation for the waterfall – exported out as an Alembic – although shading for translucency is a bit tricky with such non-standard fast moving meshes – there’s a bit more effort required to get a good result.

The ground water was done in Blender using dynamic paint and a particle system to create an animated displacement. This was then bought into UE5 using the Alembic geometry cache export and simulated within sequencer. This allowed for a relatively lightweight, stable and controllable water simulation that displaced over the rocks for a more realistic result – not just a flipbook animation here.

The rain was a simple Niagara particle system with a masked texture of a raindrop created in Blender and rendered with a cubemap of the scene – this allowed for cheaper reflections and less flickering with the fast moving objects. The splashes were Niagara sprites using the same texture set to randomly generate at the impact zone.

All that said, this is still the Early Access – and there are plenty of bugs and issues that cropped up – most notably the flickering reflections and inconstancies with translucency with Lumen – something that should be fixed with the final release.