Dragon Age: Inquisition in Unreal Engine 5 - A UE5 Cinematic: Emprise du Lion Pt.2

For those new – this is the continuation of my ‘Thedas Magic Mystery World Tour’ – where I’m recreating short little cinematics from the game Dragon Age: Inquisition in Unreal Engine 5 – using some of the exciting new features such as Nanite and Lumen. Partly as a technical show-piece – partly because it’s just a more fun way of learning the ins and outs of UE5 – and I’m just a big fan of the Dragon Age series!

Here we have Emprise du Lion Pt.2! This is on the mountain path leading up to the third camp on the map. Also, trying out a more cinematic framing with the black bars. Not sure if it completely works – any thoughts?

If you’re watching these in upload order, you’ll undoubtedly notice the complexity of the scenes going up with each video – that’s because I’m still learning Unreal Engine 5! I find the best way to learn a new program is simply to dive into it and figure it out as you go. Lumen and Nanite have really changed the speed and ease of creating scenes like this – and it’s amazing to be able to iterate so quickly and test out different lighting compositions without waiting an age for the viewport to res up.

After watching that amazing Black Myth: Wukong trailer (go check it out if you haven’t seen it yet – looks amazing!) I thought I’d try for a more dense, snowy scene. But this of course required quite a bit of re-texturing assets. Fortunately, Unreal has you covered for this.

Dynamic re-texturing of Quixel Megascans assets were used to add snow (but only on-top of the meshes) to simulate realistic snowfall. The snow is driven procedurally by an ‘Absolute World Position’ node – this allows for quick, dynamic re-texturing in-engine – without having to leave for a third-party program like Substance or Mixer. This greatly simplifies the iteration process, and it’s great to be able to tweak each instance of the asset to really nail the look you’re going for and balance out the composition. Best of all, it’s non-destructive and since it’s based on the asset’s in-world position – not baked texture masks – moving and rotating the asset in the editor accurately places the snow on surfaces facing up – no matter which direction the asset is actually facing!

This node setup to blend materials together could easily be used to drive moss, mud, sand, dust, dirt etc… It’s very powerful and adds a lot of (relatively) simple customisation for your scene. While it’s a bit of work to set up the material functions, it’s well worth the effort.

I’ve also been playing around with the ‘SimpleGrassWind’ node – adding a complex node setup to automatically randomise the wind intensity, speed and size per instance of foliage – giving it a more natural look and breaking up the uniformity. It still looks a bit strange sometimes, but much better than the default. It’s definitely something that I’ll be tweaking further for other scenes.