[UE5] The Two Guys

[ Artistic Intent ]
For this piece, I wanted to push my workflow both technically and visually. I built a single set and explored it through multiple lighting setups, studying how much light alone can shift the emotional tone of a scene. Rather than aiming for realism, I focused on mood and intentionality: the lighting had to serve the composition and reinforce a specific feeling. I also challenged myself to go much further in DaVinci Resolve than I usually do, treating the grade as a full creative step rather than a final touch. The goal was to mimic real life camera effects (dirt, lens, chromatic aberration etc).
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| Artistic Inspirations |
This project started as an experiment with no rigid direction, but I was visually inspired by two films ended up anchoring the visual language pretty quickly: The Dam Keeper for its painterly, emotionally charged atmosphere, and The Lego Movie. Beyond those, I pulled scattered references from films like Toy Story and other various shots to study how they handle color palettes and mood.
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[ Technical Setup ]
This was my first real dive into Path Tracing in Unreal Engine, which was the main technical challenge of the project. The scene was assembled using Megascans assets. The final image was rendered through Movie Render Queue, then taken into DaVinci Resolve for a more involved color grade than usual where I also got to learn the basics of Fusion to create compositing effects like chromatic aberration, before a final polish pass in Photoshop.