Droid Productions

Behind the scenes: UE5

Added 2025-04-21 04:11:05 +0000 UTC

I quite enjoy making these little behind-the-scenes updates; this time I'm looking at how space-based cutscenes are being made in UE5 for Wings of Empire.

The logic for doing them in Unreal Engine comes down to a few things:

Realtime rendering. This is a huge improvement over Blender or Daz, with a 1,500 cutscene rendering in ~3 mins instead of 24 hrs.
Better support for scripting. I intend to automate a lot of the heavy VFX lifting (think capital ships firing broadsides at each other, 100s of missiles flying, etc). It's the only way I'll manage to make the kind of epic space battles I dream of.
Pre-rendering them allows me to not worry about performance on the end-user computer, which is a big deal. It also lets me bring the clips into After Effects for additional FX work (for example with the space portal transition.

I guess I could have replicated the same workflow in Unity if I had put my mind to it (importing assets from blender, setting up combat in Unity, and exporting the whole thing to a video clip. I personally prefer the visual look and feel of Unreal Engine for something like this, and it has far better tools for in-engine cinematics.

So what's next? The inspiration to making this little video was actually that I had UE5 open to render out some sprites for the combat minigame, and decided to share things with you guys.

Is this kind of behind the scenes stuff interesting for you guys? Let me know in the comments.