The next step in Unreal was to make the scene nighttime. I tried to follow tutorials, but none seemed to have UE 5.3 like I did, so their interfaces were very different. Eventually, I went through the sidebar and played with the settings until I found a slider that dimmed the light from the sun. This is the result.

I then went to Quixel Bridge, downloaded some snow piles and stumps and arranged them where I wanted the model to sit. I left it rough as the composition would look different once the creature was imported.

I imported the texture maps from Substance into a material on UE, and then imported the model.

When imported, the creature didn’t retain its’ pose. I got Henry to help me out, and after a few failed tries we applied the rig to the mesh in Blender and imported one of the lower-level resolutions (the high-level detail was already baked in Substance). This time it worked.

The background looked a bit barren. I had originally wanted fir trees, but I couldn’t find any on Quixel. Instead, I added a fog. This added atmosphere and took away attention from the background. More will be added to the scene later.

I wanted to achieve a more realistic look by adding snow. I followed a few video tutorials, again running into the differing versions problem. I managed to get a small dusting of snow, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the radius bigger. I decided to ditch it and paint the snow in Photoshop.