Rain Garden in UNREAL ENGINE 5 – Forest in A Bottle: A UE5 Cinematic

A cinematic animation of a relaxing indoor rain garden terrarium, rendered in real-time using Unreal Engine 5. There’s just something about nature and the sound of falling water that’s so calming.

Inspired by Asu – specifically this video here: https://youtu.be/Qv8wXxH8O3w If you know, you know.

This is a rework of an old project, originally started in Blender Eevee as a test of what real-time rendering was capable of. Previous version here: https://youtu.be/zX9SpXj5nHk

But with the release of Unreal Engine 5 Early Access – the game changed. With Nanite and especially Lumen – UE5’s dynamic global illumination system – what previously would have been impossible even in UE4 – is now simply breathtakingly easy.

Even using Eevee – Blender’s internal real-time engine – (which is no slouch) I was getting a render time of around 4-5 mins per frame at a 2K resolution – with a single Nvidia 1060 Max-Q graphics card. With Unreal Engine 5, using far higher poly meshes and on the same card – it was averaging at around half-a-second to 1 second per frame – at 4K resolution with almost zero noise! It’s simply on another level. Believe the hype, people.

A combination of Blender modelled + textured meshes, Quixel Megascans and free online models were used – along with some photoscans from Ian Hubert’s pateron.

The 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.

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.