The Conqueror - Unreal Engine 5.4

Hello there, soon to be conquered souls!

Every time a new Unreal Engine version or preview comes around, I always take a dive into it and make a little thing, just to test out the 'feel' of the new version. I absolutely love new features, but I can't help but feel that every version has its own vibe. It might be the stability, it might be improvement in the technologies behind the engine, or it might just be my delusion.

In any case, this time around I found it very hard to return to Unreal Engine to create something 'just for the fun of it.' I've been working extremely hard the past year, doing lots of different work projects ranging from prerendered, to Virtual Production realtime stages, to theatre stuff, etc. On top of that, last year I made a few of my longest videos like 'The Wizard', 'Launch' and my Digital Fashion concept show. While I love working in Unreal, if you're doing it at the pace I've been going at, it won't take long before you run out of fuel and burn out. I know what a burnout feels like so I felt it coming and tried to prevent it from fully happening, so I've cut down on doing Unreal stuff for personal amusement and only focusing on the 'work'-stuff that needs to happen in a healthy way, prioritising friends and family and other creative persuits. Sometimes it pays to take a little step back.

But yesterday I felt like having a go at it so I finally opened up Unreal Engine 5.4 to get a feel of the 'vibe' of the new engine version and it really feels like this could become my new favorite version after 5.3. It feels more solid and I had a lot of fun putting together this end-of-the-world scene with a nice robot model I bought off artstation. I've created the environment using the Physical Layout tool (which only works up until 5.3 at this point in time so I had to create it in 5.3 and then upgrade to 5.4 once I was happy) which allowed me to organically place anything I want using physics. So I could make nice, organic piles of rocks.... or skulls.

So, no real story or groundbreaking visuals here. Just a nice little dive into 5.4, go and check it out and give it a try.

Cheers,
Sam