Oceans at Night in Unreal Engine 5: A UE5 Cinematic

I always loved that scene from Life of Pi – with the bioluminescent algae? So I thought – hey, why not? This is the follow up to my first oceans video – which a lot of people were really interested in – so this is me upping the ante a bit.

These scenes were rendered out in Unreal Engine 5 with RTX ray-tracing for the reflections and the translucency. Multiple Niagara particle systems were used for the algae & the jellyfish. The ocean displacement was created using Blender’s Ocean Modifier tool and exported out to UE5 as an Alembic geometry cache.

For the whale – I baked out an ambient occlusion map in Blender, and then used that to drive an emission material for the algae clinging to the sides of the whale. Finally, I did a smoke simulation in Blender using the whale mesh as an emitter and rendered it out using Eevee with a transparent background. I then bought it into Unreal as an animated media texture card, placing it underneath the ocean for that ambient distance glow.