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I made a Christmas piece in Unreal Engine 5 that’s going to be projected at The Good Lot in Cedar Park, just off New Hope Drive. It’s a decorated tree with a little elf who keeps popping out of the branches, and a stream of rainbow pixie dust that winds up the tree and turns into a star at the top. The whole thing is a two and a half minute loop, so it can run all night without a visible restart.

What’s in it

The tree is White Christmas tree by Filin90 on TurboSquid. I brought it into Unreal Engine 5.8, placed the presents underneath and tuned the ornament materials. The string lights pulse and shift color on a 30 second cycle.

Every 30 seconds a stream of pixie dust spirals up from the bottom of the tree. Its color runs through the rainbow twice on the way up, then it gathers at the top into a white star. The star hangs there for about ten seconds before it breaks apart and the next stream starts.

The elf was made with Meshy. He pops out at twelve different spots around the tree, does his animation and ducks back in. I wanted him small (a bit bigger than the medium ornaments) and sitting waist-deep in the branches, with his legs still inside the tree, so it looks like he’s really in there.

How I made it

Since it’s going up on a structure, the camera sits at eye level and the frame is tall (1386 × 1920) to fit the projection surface. I also turned up the contrast on the ambient occlusion so the branches and ornaments have more depth.

The trickiest part was making the loop seamless. Everything in the scene runs off the same clock. The pixie dust repeats every 30 seconds, the elf gets through all twelve spots in 150 seconds, and the lights come back around to their starting colors at 150 seconds too. So the video is exactly 150 seconds long (4,500 frames at 30 fps), and the last frame runs straight into the first.

For the final render I used Movie Render Queue with Lumen and MegaLights. I turned the lighting quality up about as far as it would go without crashing and used 32 samples per frame to clean up the noise in the lighting. A full render takes about an hour and a half.

I used Claude Code as my technical partner on this one. It worked inside the Unreal editor through Epic’s MCP plugin and built the Niagara particle system, the Blueprint that times the elf, and the render scripts. I set the look and made the calls on what went where.

If you’re out at The Good Lot over the holidays, keep an eye out for the elf.

Credits

• Christmas tree: White Christmas tree by Filin90 on TurboSquid
• Elf: made with Meshy (meshy.ai)
• Built and rendered in Unreal Engine 5.8