Tests in Unreal Engine 5

‍

‍
‍

Over the past few years, we’ve been exploring the possibilities of Unreal Engine, with the ambition of seeing whether we can implement parts of the real-time engine into our 3D pipeline.The goal has been to evaluate whether the quality and visual fidelity are strong enough to be used in production.

‍

‍

To really put the technology to the test and see how far we could take it, we chose to recreate a Viking village — with a focus on authenticity and high levels of detail. The aim was to create a living environment that captures the atmosphere and everyday life of a historical Viking settlement, including everything from buildings and nature to lighting and real-time weather effects.

‍

The project was driven entirely by our team, without external funding or partners, which gave us the freedom to experiment and push boundaries without compromise. This approach allowed us to focus on discovering new techniques and workflows.

‍

‍

The result feels like a big step forward. Not everything reaches full production level, and there are definitely glitches that are acceptable in a game engine but much harder to deal with in a film production or cinematic. At the same time, the real-time engine gives us enormous opportunities to iterate, which ultimately results in a much stronger product.

‍
Alongside this project, we’ve also worked on several commercial projects where the limitations of the technology became more noticeable since we couldn’t control the final result as freely. Among these are a few museum projects, which we’ll be able to share here as soon as we get approval.

Here are a few other environment tests we’ve done earlier:

‍