I would totally be OK with Star Wars leading the charge for driving visuals forward.
The pictures were mocked up by Jason Lewis, a senior environment artist at Obsidian Entertainment. Obsidian’s got plenty of projects on the go right now, but that hasn’t stopped Lewis and 16 other artists from taking part in a little pet project.
That pet project: teaching themselves the Unreal 4 engine and flexing their Star Wars fandom at the same time by recreating the city of Mos Eisley.
According to Lewis, the project originally started as a journey to build a 3D version of the space smuggler’s dream, the Millennium Falcon. “It started out as a simple 3ds Max model, but then I thought it might be pretty neat to see it run in real-time,” he wrote.
“Since I had no Unreal 4 experience prior to this, I figured this could be a great project to learn UE4 with, so my goal was to build the most highly detailed real-time Falcon that anyone has ever seen, and I think I have pulled it off, except for maybe the Falcon model from the recent ILM X-Labs VR demo that was at GDC a few months ago.
The Falcon’s pretty neat, and Lewis thought so as well. But then it grew from there — why not add the Mos Eisley Cantina too? And some other surroundings?
If you’d like, you can actually download the level and explore it for yourself. “We are also working on a VR version as well as several people in the group have been playing around with Occulus and Vive VR kits, and we thought it would be cool to have a version that runs in VR, so we are currently trying to get that finished as well.”
You can read the other details about how it all came together, as well as some advice on the actual development and creation of the models and environments, over at 80.lv.
Comments
15 responses to “When Mos Eisley Meets The Unreal Engine”
There’s got to be a least little bit of “Hey Disney, look at this” about this project right? To be fair I’d love Gritty Fallout New Vegas style Star Wars RPG
Don’t you get my hopes up for such a glorious thing you motherf*cker! Because we all know it ain’t happening. *sob*
Fuck. Yes.
Ugh. No thanks. Had more than enough of Obsidian’s sneering putdowns of game players under the guise of 4th wall breaking philosophical wankery, and their penchant for releasing bugridden broken messes with New Vegas and KotOR2 (in the case of KotOR2, completely unfinished as well). I really don’t understand what people see in them, or the love New Vegas gets at all.
KotOR2 wasn’t completely their fault. They had asked for and gained a (verbal) agreement to delay the game for an extra few months to finish it, but Lucasarts reneged on the deal last minute and told them with only a week or two left that they had to ship it for the US holiday season. And in New Vegas’ case, Bethesda was responsible for the lackadaisical QA.
Their more recent games are generally pretty solidly made, and their games back when they were Black Isle were well produced too.
Oh God. I need this.
Unfortunately the chucklefucks at Disney decided to give the license for all Star Wars games to EA so instead we get to watch them sit on their hands and periodically crap out an update for Battlefront.
Thanks for the link, guys! Jason Lewis and his team did an amazing job!
Not to be picky but the X-Wing looks far too bulky and compact than i’m used to!
Bulky AND compact? Care to clarify as that seems rather contradictory.
Bulky is also used as an adjective to describe stocky.
Pretty sure that’s just the FOV. That whole image has a ‘fish eye’ view going on.
Yeah it was the default fov.
Weirdly it actually started to make me feel sick until I changed it – and I don’t normally have a problem with motion sickness.
Here is another mirror:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9zHIQSjOYuYSEZhdGZDUnhrRUU/view?usp=sharing
Anyone tried it in VR?
I was expecting much better from them. Considering those involved included senior and even lead artists. 🙁
I saw the X-wings, but didn’t see the Falcon. By that point I’d already seen a load of bad textures, mixed quality models, and bad level design, so I didn’t see any reason to continue.