Skyrim in Unreal Engine 5: Dawnstar

The city of Dawnstar from Skyrim, re-made in Unreal Engine 5 – almost eleven years since the game first came out!

I’ve been using this scene to practice my snow workflows – and stress testing a very heavy Nanite scene, along with difficult low lighting conditions for Lumen – and it actually went far better that I was expecting! This entire scene is running dynamically at around 40-45 fps on the ‘high’ preset on an RTX 3060.

Most of this snow is fully 3D (not just textures) and was procedurally generated in Blender to conform on top of the various assets in the scene. A mix of Quixel Megascans, third party assets and custom modelled and textured assets were used. Volumetric clouds and fog allow for that moody, Arctic atmosphere, especially where it covers the top of the mountains.