Fractal Atlantis Meditation
Rocker Science
Unreal Engine 5
Release Date: 2023
Austin, TX
This 28-minute visual and auditory meditation was generated with Unreal Engine 5.2 and the Machina Infinitum Fractal Generator. Various parameters were introduced with this version including Lumen and Nanite, in which billions of polygons are now rendered seemlessly with a technique called Temporal Super Resolution. Volumetric light rays were generated with Raycasting. Music was produced with Ableton Live using Native Instrument soft synthesis and vocal sampling. The result is a wondrous journey through fractals.
Landscaping
Next, I added an ocean and lake texture system. The shape of the water mass can easily be stretched and pulled, as it's part of a spline generator system. This plug-in makes it insanely easy to transform the speed, wave frequency, color, and overall shape of either an ocean or lake system. Additionally, this system can interact with other objects as colliders.
Most Unreal Engine builds will usually start with world creation. I utilized the various brushes including sculpt, smooth, flatten, and noise. However, I found that adding a splash of the 'erosion' brush with a relatively like tool strength set to a value of 0.15 gave just the correct amount of erosion effect on the topography.
Wireframe analysis of the landscape is also a good way to understand the general polygon complexity and to get a sense of the way particles are interacting with the landscape. In this case, I have a particle generator swirling on the inside of a hole where the Fractal Atlantis will be emanating. The one thing I notice is that the fractal generator itself doesn't create its own polygonal systen.
Additional point lights and particle effects were added to the scene to give a sense of fantasy as the fractal generator product is beginning to take shape. Thanks to the realtime ray-casting calculations of Lumen, the light from the particle f/x don't need to be re-rendered, and the reflections are instantly calculated.
There were multiple parameters available to affect the shape of the fractal generator. I found that very slight changes made within the Rotational 4DX, Offset W, Menger Scale, and Scale W parameters allowed the fractal to grow. Once these settings were initialized, the same Menger Scale, Rotational 4DX, and Offset W parameters were imported into the Sequencer to allow for animation capabilities throughout the animation sequence. Notice the Current Aperture is set to 1.8 stop for cinematic FOV.
During moments in which the fractal generator was growing out of the water, turbidity effects were animated by change the velocity parameters within the water system.
Notice that the camera was placed at various positions to really maximize the effect of the volumetric raycasting light from the sun, and the angle of the sky light was set to mimic an evening dusk.
The dynamic ocean system color was set to appear that this scene was found somewhere in the Caribbean, and the transparency of the water system is pretty remarkable.
Another great effect from the raycasting capabilities of the Lumen system is the creation of dynamic sun reflections and bokeh light flares coming off the waves. The final screen capture below shows the high resolution capabilities of capturing images at 4K and the ability of the fractal generator to refect light even without a polygonal system. This shows the processing power of UE 5.2
