After I finished my models and my teammates finished theirs, I was able to begin building my scene in unreal engine.

I built a long hallway for the opening shot, which leads into the main lab. I added my stairs and have a balcony with the surgical table on the second floor. I added a lot of decals to decorate the place, and green lighting for the monitors and test chambers.

Assembling my scene took quite some time, a lot longer than expected. While the layout itself was fairly simple, I had a lot of clutter to decorate the scene and make it feel more messy. A few of my teammates’ models were unfortunately unusable, but luckily there were still plenty of assets to use.

After assembling my scene and setting up my shots, i was ready to render, and that’s when I ran into my biggest issue – my scenes wouldn’t render.

Every time I went to render my scenes, I got an error message. When asking my lecturer for help we still couldn’t get it to work.

It took quite a while to find a solution to my problem, but eventually I found something that worked – I had to go to every single material in my Unreal project and tick these two boxes. I’m still not entirely sure why or how it worked.

There was no way to automate this process (that i knew of) so I had to manually do this for over 100 materials, which took a long time – this also happened on the day of the deadline itself so it was definitely setting me back.

Luckily, this method worked. Unfortunately this stopped the flickering lights I had in my scene from working, and I was unable to figure out how to get them working again, but at the end of the day I was just glad to be able to render my scenes.