This Night Train 3D Animation Looks Like a Scene from a Fairytale

Technical Environment Artist Seb van den Beemt unveiled this fascinating train animation, which immediately captures attention with its mind-blowing bridge effect. It runs entirely at runtime using Unreal Engine's Niagara. Apart from UE5, the artist utilized a combination of Blender, Substance 3D Painter, and Houdini. The HDRI is from AmbientCG.

The setup has an amazing fairytale-style look, with soft clouds and gentle lighting that evoke the cozy visual tone of animated films for children, like Warner Bros.' 2004 film The Polar Express.

On ArtStation, Seb van den Beemt shared an insightful look at the setup, explaining the magic behind the self-assembling bridge. The fascinating effect is controlled by a single Niagara system; the system is separated into four states, and each of them represents the behavior of a bridge module at a given time.

Below, you can take a look at the assets used in the scene. According to the artist, the cloud assets were generated in Houdini and brought into Unreal Engine through VDB.

Seb van den Beemt's other projects include a detailed billboard generation system, a Blender plug-in for exporting Vertex Animation Textures to game engines, a procedural Japanese temple scene, and more: