004: Godzilla Breaks The Internet and Riven Returns

Welcome back to the Outpost. It’s the 29th June 2024.

It’s been a hot one this week, but it hasn’t stopped the Unreal community. This week we have some impressive Unreal filmmaking, a classic game reborn and a deep dive into Unreal Subsystems. Whether you’re cooling off in Stockholm or working away on your personal project on vacation. Here are your weekend reads.

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

Creating Hollywood Style Effects In Unreal Engine

Josh Toonan’s Godzilla has been making the rounds on social this week as something of a tech demo for what is possible in Unreal Engine. In this video he breaks down his process for building his set piece.

This is great masterclass in filmmaking in Unreal, he shares all the assets, environmental design considerations and sound cues. This is a great watch for cinematic artists and filmmakers.

Riven Returns In Unreal Engine 5

Cyan, the storied developer behind Myst and Riven has returned with another Unreal Engine remake. This time it’s Riven in Unreal Engine 5. The gorgeous visual upgrade gives the classic something new to offer, while keeping the heart of what came before.

Digital Foundry has a great breakdown not just on the visual upgrades but also the differences from the original and the tasteful decisions made it updating for a modern era.

Toolbox

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

Runtime Audio Importer

Audio can be a wild beast to manage, especially if you are trying to pull from different sources to build the soundscape you want. RuntimeAudioImporter simplifies that process by allowing you to import a number of formats from raw to compressed. There’s even some functionality for streaming if that’s something you have been considering.

SubsystemBrowserPlugin

This plugin visualises and opens up the hidden world of Unreal’s Subsystems. Subsystems if you haven’t come across them before allow you to crate classes that extend the capabilities of the engine with overriding engine defaults. They are super handy if you’re building your own extensions in Python or Blueprints, and you don’t want to edit source.

The Subsystem…system is not all that well exposed. This plugin gives you a great way of displaying your modifications, showing you what is active at any time and letting you build things like custom tooltips.

Pinboard

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

This week’s selection for the Pinboard starts with Mailman Beckett - Island from Lincoln Phung. A student project based on an idea for a platformer. If you check out Lincoln’s Art Station you can check out the little details and a few fly throughs of this bright, realised and stylised environment.

Next up is Christophe Desson’s “Training Ground”. Based off concept art from Robin Lhebrard. Christophe has a great breakdown on his ArtStation with Material node graphs and a Blueprint break down. Not pictured here is the additional character animation, which is also detailed in the post.

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.