I never thought I’d spend a Tuesday afternoon building a desert landscape populated by the Mandalorian. But here we are.

It started with a practical problem. A beauty client came to me last month wanting campaign imagery with a very specific golden-hour mood, something warm and directional, almost cinematic. We didn’t have the budget for a reshooot, and the original RAW files had flat, overcast light that was fighting me at every step. I found myself wishing I understood light construction from the ground up, not just how to fake it in post, but how it actually builds.

That’s what led me to this tutorial from photographer and educator Serge Ramelli.

Serge is known for his Lightroom and Photoshop work, so watching him step confidently into Unreal Engine 5 felt like permission. If a photographer can learn this, so can I.

Installing the Engine and Setting Your First Scene

The first thing Serge does, which I appreciated, is demystify the install. Unreal Engine 5 is free through the Epic Games Launcher, and he walks you through downloading it without assuming you have a game development background. Once inside, he creates a new level using a template that already includes basic lighting. This matters because you’re not starting from a blank void. You get a sun, a sky atmosphere, and a sense of space immediately.

From there he adds a landscape using Unreal’s built-in landscape tool. The terrain is generated procedurally, meaning you can sculpt hills, valleys, and flats without drawing anything by hand. For someone coming from photo editing, think of it like a liquify brush applied to actual three-dimensional geometry.

Quixel Bridge Is the Secret Weapon Here

The section starting around the 10-minute mark is where things got genuinely exciting for me. Serge imports surface textures, rocks, and ground cover using Quixel Bridge, which is a library of photorealistic 3D assets that comes free with Unreal Engine. The textures are photographed from real materials, which means they respond to light the way real surfaces do.

He uses a simple drag-and-drop workflow to apply a ground material to his landscape, then scatters plants across the scene using Unreal’s foliage tool. You paint them on like you’re brushing in a texture layer, and the engine handles the variation in size, rotation, and density automatically. The result looks like a real location within about 20 minutes of work.

Moving the Sun to Find the Light

This is the part that hit me hardest as someone who thinks about light all day. Around the 18-minute mark, Serge shows how to physically rotate the directional light (the sun) by simply clicking and dragging. You watch in real time as hard shadows shift, golden warmth wraps around surfaces, and the mood of the entire scene changes in seconds.

In photo retouching, we spend enormous energy trying to reconstruct that kind of directional, wrapping light after the fact, using dodge and burn, luminosity masks, color grading layers. Watching Serge drag a sun across a virtual sky made me realize how much of that work is reverse-engineering a lighting setup that could have been intentional from the start.

He also adds a spotlight pointed at the Mandalorian figure around the 29-minute mark, using it to separate the subject from the background the way a beauty photographer would use a kicker or rim light. Same logic, different tools.

Building the Animation and Finishing with Post Process

Serge creates a simple camera animation using Unreal’s Sequencer tool, which works a lot like a timeline in video editing software. He sets keyframes at different positions along a camera path and the engine interpolates the movement between them. He also shows how to make those keyframe transitions linear rather than eased, which keeps the camera from the floaty, dreamy movement that can make CG footage feel cheap.

The post-process volume section, starting around 41 minutes, is directly relevant to retouching work. Serge uses it to add film grain, control exposure, shift the color temperature, and add bloom to bright areas. These are the same adjustments we make in Camera Raw or in Lightroom. The difference is they’re applied globally to a 3D scene in real time, and they affect how light behaves rather than just how pixels look.

He wraps up with rendering through the Movie Render Queue plugin, then does a final color pass in DaVinci Resolve 17. Export, grade, done.

Where I’d Push This Further for Beauty Applications

I’ll be honest about where my brain diverged from Serge’s during the tutorial. His focus is on environment and cinematic storytelling, which is exactly what the Mandalorian scene calls for. But for beauty work, I’d want to spend much more time on the spotlight behavior: the softness of the falloff, the color temperature relative to the ambient fill, the way light wraps around a curved surface.

Unreal Engine’s physically based rendering means that if you understand how a beauty dish or a strip softbox behaves in real life, you can replicate it in the engine. That opens up the possibility of previewing lighting concepts for a campaign before a single strobe is rented. That’s where I think this tool gets genuinely useful for people in our world.

The single most important thing I took from this tutorial is that real-time 3D lighting and photo retouching are solving the same problem from opposite ends. Understanding both makes you better at each.

Watch the full tutorial on Serge Ramelli’s YouTube channel to see the visual workflow, especially the Quixel Bridge import and the sequencer animation, which are much easier to absorb by watching than by reading.