Unreal Engine 5.8 Technical Artist — Dark Fantasy Look Development

About the project We're developing a project with a very specific visual target: a dark fantasy / gothic aesthetic with a heavy analog film feel — think Elden Ring key art crossed with 1970s fantasy paperback covers. Extremely low-key lighting, volumetric fog, desaturated and tinted color grades, lifted murky blacks, strong film grain, and a painterly/illustrated finish rather than clean photorealism. Reference images are attached to this post. Your job is to hit that look, not approximate it. The 1-week prototype (paid trial) Before committing to a longer engagement, we want a focused 1-week look development prototype in Unreal Engine 5.8. Using placeholder or marketplace assets (no custom modeling required), deliver: One small environment scene (e.g., a hooded figure by a river at night, or a gothic interior with candles) assembled from stock/Megascans/marketplace assets. A complete lighting setup — Lumen GI, minimal motivated light sources, MegaLights for multi-candle scenes if appropriate, locked manual exposure with genuinely dark shadow floors. Atmosphere pass — exponential height fog, volumetric fog, local fog volumes for ground mist. A post-process "look" package — color grading (or baked LUT), heavy film grain, vignette, subtle chromatic aberration, soft low-threshold bloom, tuned to match the references. A stylization pass — via Substrate NPR/Toon shading (new in 5.8) and/or a custom post-process material (e.g., Kuwahara/painterly filter, halftone or dither overlay) so the frame reads as illustration, not raw 3D. Deliverables: the Unreal project folder (or a plugin/migration-ready content folder), 5–10 high-res still frames rendered through Movie Render Graph, a short (2–3 min) flythrough video, and a one-page breakdown of your post-process stack and settings so our team can reuse it. We will judge the trial on how closely your stills match the attached references — mood, grain, and grade — not on asset quality or scene size. Required skills Strong portfolio of dark, stylized, or NPR work in Unreal Engine (this is the #1 requirement — proposals without relevant portfolio pieces will not be considered) Deep knowledge of UE5 post-processing: color grading, LUTs, film grain, bloom, custom post-process materials Lumen lighting workflows and cinematic lighting fundamentals (chiaroscuro, motivated lighting) Material Editor proficiency, including Custom HLSL nodes for filter effects Movie Render Graph for high-quality still/sequence output Unreal Engine 5.8 specifically (or 5.5+ with willingness to work in 5.8; familiarity with Substrate NPR shading is a big plus) Nice to have Experience emulating analog media (film grain, halftone, VHS, print textures) DaVinci Resolve / Photoshop LUT authoring Niagara for embers, dust motes, drifting fog particles C++ scene view extension / global shader experience (not required — material-based solutions are fine)