The video you are about to see is not camera footage of it Etchu Daimon Station in Japan. It’s a video by 3D artist Lorenzo Drago.
Drago, created in Unreal Engine 5 with Lumens lighting, says he did “all the modeling, texturing, lighting and animation” in the clip, except for the foliage you briefly see, which is from Quixel Megascans. That means he built almost everything himself. The steps, the walls, the lights, the cables, the works, with some textures by hand and others from photos.
“For this project, I wanted to get as close to photorealism as possible,” he says.
I used camera adjustment to get accurate proportions and used the reference carefully. I adjusted the dimensions afterwards to help with modularity.
Aside from detail textures and alphas created from photos, I created all textures from scratch in Painter and created custom materials in Unreal for use with vertex painting or masks to break up repeats.
While the quality of the space itself is incredible – and took about a month to complete – which adds to the whole look and feel real is the way the camera is used. “To shoot the video,” Drago says, “I used real-time VR tracking to emulate a handheld camera and flashlight.”
See? just wow. This is the part where I have to remind you that this video was carefully madesmart just for that footage, and as such, we can’t and shouldn’t expect this level of fidelity in our current games any time soon. But still.
Let’s end with some little things. First, this video was not recorded in real time. Drago says it’s possible, but that “the picture quality is worse,” So this is instead a high-resolution rendering shot at 7 fps. And in case you’re wondering, he did it on an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with an RTX 2080.
