My journey started by trying to learn how to use the Unreal Engine. I'm an illustrator, not a programmer. Blueprints were very attractive to me. It was a little confusing at first, but thanks to lots of Youtube and Skillshare tutorials, Unreal documentation, and Unreal learning paths, I was able to quickly gain some confidence using the engine and projects. I failed a lot, of course. I fought and continue to fight, and I still don't understand several points, but I'm happy and confident because I feel that I'm learning, improving, and achieving better results.

In my first few attempts at the game, I tried using the new Unreal Engine 5 options like lumen and nanite and used virtual shadow maps. The first wall models I built directly in the engine, using the cube grid modeling process. It was very quick and pleasant to work with, but I still feel very limited. Lumen is very useful and gives great results with little effort. I used a lot of lights, stationery, and moveable, and of course, that wasn't going well. I used a lot of spotlights too. It was a dream, but it cost me a lot on the optimization side (I hope it's better now).

So, to correct my mistakes and try to get better optimization, I integrated Blender into my pipeline. I modeled the walls, floor, lamps, openings, and doors, the elevator, and after a lot of trial and error, I'm finally getting some good results with my models, my UVs, and my light maps. It's still not perfect, some shadow artifacts still, but the meshes are pretty low density, and building the modular level was really fun and quick to use (and worked pretty well if you ask me). I've turned off lumen and nanite for now and am working much more cautiously with my lights (big performance enemies, at least for me), using lots of static light (which I need to learn to improve results), and changing all my light spotlights. I used low-resolution textures straight from Quixel and everything was much lighter and faster.

I use Unreal Engine 5, but no lumen, for now, Blender, Mixamo for the model and animations (I will replace the model and animations in the future), a lot of SFX and music that I buy in the unreal market or humble bundle and other free stuff, as sources. I'm doing all the code in blueprints.

So I know there's a lot to improve and a lot to learn, but I'm very happy with my results so far. I hope you feel it too.