Using Unreal Engine and the Paragon assets, I created a pipeline to render 3D models in Unreal Engine to bring them into Factorio.

These units don't spawn naturally. Use the editor to spawn them in. I want some more polish before allowing for this.

Paragon 3D assets are only available to be used with Unreal Projects. The results here demonstrate the power and flexibility of Unreal Engine.

I also used a modified version of this plugin to capture the images and generate them into a sheet. Minor changes were made to ensure the plugin compiled on Mac, and worked with Unreal 5.5.

Chaos destruction was used to destroy a structure (that represents a spawner) and cache it. The cached destruction was then played back and captured by the camera.

Shadows were created by swapping out all materials with a black color, and then rotating the model by 90 roll, 90 pitch and recapturing the animations. Mixed results there.

Units have attack, death, and movement animations.

Each frame is 512x512.

Units have 16 directions - and 16 frames per direction.

I will consider moving to smaller sprite sizes and 8 directions with only 8 frames of animation in the future for optimization.

I dislike that I was not able to find an optimal solution for projectile spawn locations relative to the sprite. At least it doesn't look like bullets are coming out of the units head. Spent hours trying to get a better result but I give up.