Early on in this assignment my group and I decided we wanted to aim for creating a hybrid between a tavern and a science lab. As we got further into the project we moved more so towards the science lab aspect of the piece rather than the tavern. The first pieces of real work I did on the project was a few concept sheets depicting lab machinery and plants that would be growing in the lab. We created drawings for a few plants designed to look like a hybrid between the plant itself and different kinds of animals.
We went on to make a blockout of the lab and a list of assets we would be needing. Originally we had planned to have the science lab acting as a kitchen for a restaurant on the other side of it however during the blockout phase we decided it would be a better idea to focus our full attention on making assets for the science lab. I was given the task of modelling the plant I designed and a chamber holding it along with some other miscellaneous items around the lab like tools and general decorations.
My main piece I had to model was my plant. I really liked the idea of the stem being a spine so it was one of the first things I worked on for the piece. I modelled one vertebra using images of fish bones as reference. I then used the array modified to assemble them along a curve in blender.
For the petals I just made one from a plane and arrayed it in a circle
I made the container out of a cylinder and some other simple geometry parts.
For the tools I made I just imported images of tools into blender and used them as a base for my models.
I also made beakers and other science glassware that I used the cell fracture blender add on to create a broken glass object from.
Another member of my team was in charge of creating the walls, floor and roof parts of our scene so once we were all mostly done our assets we created a dropbox to share them with each other and start assembling our individual scenes. My plan was to separate my scene into three small rooms showcasing different assets. I intended to lay the entire scene out first before moving onto lighting but I found it easier to do the lighting along with the scene so I could move certain pieces around depending on how good they looked with whatever lighting I was testing. As I was putting the scene together I made a few more basic objects such as books, notebooks, pencils and windows in places I thought were looking too bare. I also wanted to experiment with the lighting in the scene so I went for a different look in each room. 
I struggled a little bit with the actual camerawork of the scene. I was able to understand and use unreal engine reasonably well but it took me quite a while to actually find positions for the cameras that I thought showcased the scene well.
I also attempted to make a cel shader for my scene and although I did like how it looked in certain areas I could not figure out how to get it to showcase coloured lights and since those played a large part in my piece I figured it would probably be a better use of my time to just work on the scene as it was rather than spending all my time trying to figure out the cel shader.
Reflection
Throughout the duration of this project I learned many of the basics of using Unreal Engine 5. I had never used Unreal Engine previously to this project but I had surprisingly little issues with the program itself. I generally had a simple enough time when it came to importing and applying materials to my own objects however I did encounter a few problems with importing shared assets that were not in FBX format. I was able to get past this issue by rearranging the content folder most of the time. As for everything else I did on this project I did not encounter any major problem. I learned much more about node systems in 3D animation software during this project as I had to make adjustments to lights and materials and also tried putting a shader together. In the future I plan on working more with the cameras and sequencers to better my understanding of how to make an interesting and more cinematic scene in unreal or other animation softwares.