This is clearly unacceptable, so some compromises had to be made. Unreal definitely has a few snags with dynamic spotlight shadows on very complex scenes like this. I managed to use my contact shadow/shadow bias workaround to avoid the vast majority of it, but it was certainly a challenge to find the right values. I had my fingers crossed throughout this – to say it was stressful is an understatement. It can be very frustrating fighting the engine in these narrow use-cases that it wasn’t designed to work with!

Camera Work

As always: the most critical part of this project was the camera work. Even the best modeling and texturing will fall flat without composition. All of the cinematic cameras in this project used the Olympus Micro 4/3s System as their Filmback setting, meaning all images rendered by these cameras are using a 4:3 aspect ratio with a doubled crop factor.

17.5mm lenses in M4/3 are 35mm equivalent lenses, so if you’re shooting M4/3 in Unreal you’ll need to remember to double any focal length settings to get the 35mm full-frame equivalent. I shoot Olympus as an amateur photographer. I find it significantly easier to compose shots in the engine because the viewfinder in Unreal is exactly what I see in my E-M10II camera, so it feels very natural to me to work in the M4/3 format.