There weren’t enough storytelling elements in the UE scene, so I drew from my early concepts and decided to add a sleigh.

I gathered reference images and clarified the parts so I could recreate them.

After making the sleigh with the mirror modifier and joining all the pieces, I bevelled the model (which I should’ve done before applying the mirror, but I felt the slightly asymmetrical look added to the realism). 

I then positioned the model to line up with the creature and used sculpt mode to bend the harness’ shape to the pose.

I fixed the face orientation and then brought it into Substance.

I brought it back again, but I noticed some stretch on the harness. 

I went back and added seams and faces to the harness. 

I faced a few problems with the tiling in Substance – the wood grain went randomly left to right or up and down, despite the seams on the sleigh being uniform. To fix this, I created two layers, one with no rotation and another with a 90° rotation, which fixed the problem. 

The seams I added in Blender fixed the stretching.

Once I was done texturing, I painted snow, using some height variation to make it more realistic. I also added a multiply layer to the whole model and turned down the roughness to make the sleigh look damp.

Finished model:

I imported the sleigh into Unreal and positioned it to match the creature. It was difficult and it took me a while to get it right as I had moved the creature from its’ original position. I edited the landscape slightly so the sleigh looked to be sitting on the snow. 

I brought log assets in from Quixel Bridge and placed them so they looked to be falling off the back of the sleigh. At this point, I had a plan to put a village in the distance behind the creature, so the logs lead the eye to the mountain I would use for that later. 

I then tried to enhance the glow from the creature’s mouth but found that no lights affected my scene no matter how high the intensity.

Mike and I checked the original Blender file and found that I had accidentally made my creature huge. The light didn’t affect the world because it had to travel many meters to get to any surface. To solve this, we turned the intensity up to 2000000. 

After this, I started on the village. There were no tents, so I downloaded gables and used them to build pyramids, then added warm light to each one so they would look like lanterns. I made the tents very small to exaggerate the distance between the village and the creature.