An Artist Explores VHS Aesthetics in Unreal Engine 5 With Lumen

Technical Artist and Developer of the Sky Creator plug-in and Screen Space Fog Scattering shader for Unreal Engine Dmitry Karpukhin has recently shared a couple of demos showcasing a new mind-blowing experiment with Unreal Engine 5.

Taking a step away from his renowned add-ons, the artist decided to explore found footage/VHS aesthetics in the engine, producing an incredible real-time game prototype that may or may not become a fully-fledged game sometime in the future. Featuring subtle camera shake and Lumen lighting, the prototype looks highly realistic and can be easily mistaken for a scene taken straight from The Blair Witch Project at first glance.

Besides Unreal Engine 5 itself, Dmitry also utilized Aleksandr Zhdanov's Modular Abandoned Building asset pack to create the environment and a modified version of Nicolas Gauchon's procedural VHS shader to set up the distortions and glitches in post-process.

"The video compression in a funny way just eliminated all the noise and video degradation details of the VHS look," commented the creator, "so here's a screenshot of how it looks in-game:"

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