We Recreated This Viral Train Station in Unreal Engine 5

Is it real or fake?

You have definitely seen this video pass by on your feed. Many people questioned if this was a real or fake video. It's looks so good that this has to be real right? Well... sorry to break it to you but it's fake. The artist behind this piece is Lorenzo Drago, an environment artist who gave UE5 a shot. And let's be honest this looks insanely good.

What it takes to build life like enviroments

Something we tend to do when building environments is not adding enough details. Look around in real life, how much detail and imperfections are there on every single object like dust, fingerprints, scratches, etc. Everything has small imperfections and the same objects wont have the same imperfections either. It took Lorenzo Drago one month to build everything from scratch. From modeling every single object in Blender to creating textures in Substance Painter. Really impressive if you ask me.

Something that also makes it look real is to work in the right scale. When working with life like measures everything will be in proportion to each other, not triggering our brain that something might be wrong. Thus making something like this more believable.

Next to this the added handheld motion and exposure changes when moving around really brings this to life. We all perfectly know how our phone records footage and how it reacts to light change and Lorenzo Drago really nailed it! Making it look like he actually recorded this with his phone.

Storyblocks

Big thanks to Storyblocks for the support on this video. Their community driven library always help us to find something perfect every VFX shot. They really help us to bring our Visual effects to life, without compromising on anything.