003: Still Wakes The Deep Art Breakdown, Unreal Meditation and Dragons

Welcome back to the Outpost. It’s the 22nd June 2024.

Unreal Fest took place in Prague this week. We are getting a slow drip of content out of the conference, which I’m sure we’ll round up in the next edition.

This week the community have been busy with new updates to big plugins, some experimental ways of using the engine and a great look at the inner workings of Still Wakes The Deep.

If you have a great story that you want to tell, a new plugin you want to share or art you want to show off, reach out to me here.

The Latest

A Watery Look at The Art of Still Wakes The Deep

Still Wakes The Deep is the latest high profile Unreal Engine 5 release of the summer. It’s the latest game from The Chinese Room and focuses on a cosmic horror tale set in the North Sea.

Creative Bloq sat down with the artists of the game to discuss how the engine was used to create atmosphere, details and ambience. With highlights on Lumen and visual effect dynamics, this is a great read for an inside look on creating the feel of a world in your own project.

Setting up and Unreal Engine Studio the Epic Way

One of the first bits of content that have creeped their way out Unreal Fest is this great guide to how Epic approach organising their projects internally. If you are looking for some best practices on what a production ready workflow looks like this is a great place to start.

Driving a Engine States From Music and Event Cues

Zach Berwick has built a unique ambient visualiser driven by Ableton Live. The visualiser reacts in real time to midi and macro commands from a DAW. I can see this kind of thing being used for Youtube/Twitch live streams or even broader ambient applications to run in the background of a game world.

Check out Zach’s breakdown in the Youtube description or just enjoy a moment of peace with the visualiser.

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Toolbox

The Outpost’s Toolbox is for new or updated tools to help make your Unreal Engine experience a little bit easier.

FluidNinja NinjaTools Update

Andras Ketzer has released the 1.8 update of his NinjaTools plugin. Referenced by Tim Sweeney on Twitter and used by Microsoft Game Studios. NinjaTools is a 2D fluids toolkit. It drives 3D volumes and particles with very small baked data assets.

You can pick up the plugin below or download Ninja for free on the community Discord server here.

PANORAmake

PANORAmake is a plugin for artists removing the need for a round trip to the shader graph for texturing detailed landscapes in Unreal Engine. The plugin helps make texturing landscapes more familiar with a layered workflow, a mask builder and a hybrid caching system that lets you have control over your performance trade offs.

Pinboard

Check out the latest art we have been keeping a lookout for this week.

This week on the Pinboard we start with Lachlan Page’s “Vampires of the Deep” (keeping up the deep theme this week!). The work is a concept art design using a dark fantasy world riddles with vampires that hide from the sun deep beneath the ocean. Check out Lachlan’s ArtStation for a great art breakdown.

It looks like the artists from Tales Of Kenzera: Zau have been able to finally post their work for all to see. The game which released a few months ago is a beautiful Metroidvania on 2D plane. The art was stunning. I would suggest starting off a deep dive into Ackeem Durrant’s gallery full of bosses and enemies.

That’s it from the outpost this week, we’ll be back with more from the horizon next weekend.

Want to see your work featured in Unreal Outpost. Reach out to Ollie here.