Cliffside Rain Garden in UNREAL ENGINE 5 - Forest in A Bottle [UE5 Preview 2] Nanite, Lumen

A little indoor rain garden terrarium featuring a slice of cliffside, rendered in real-time using Unreal Engine 5 Preview 2, using Nanite for meshes and Lumen for global illumination.

So! First project I’ve done in the new Unreal Engine 5 Preview 2 – finally got my old projects imported and all the shaders compiled … This was done using Nanite and Lumen – and gotta say – vast improvements across the board – especially with foliage and translucent surfaces now being supported by Lumen! The new TSR AA is also very nice and crispy – compliments the high detail that Nanite brings to the table.

A combination of self modelled assets and Quixel Megascans, along with a re-done, higher resolution water sim using Blender dynamic paint vertex displacement, exported out as an alembic geometry cache. Scenes like this in particular are always useful as a test bench of sorts for new features – is very contained, but high detail so you can really test and fine-tune settings and try to push boundaries where you can!

Still a few kinks to be ironed out though – some bugs with the movie render queue for starters… but overall, it seems to be shaping up nicely for final release! If you liked this video, check out the rest of this series!