Development Project 2
In this blog I am going to look at the second Development Project assignment I had to produce for the end of term 1. In this project I wanted to test my 3D modelling skills in Blender and using some of the techniques used by Quixel in the 90 Days Series to create a castle ruins environment based on the Belforte castle in Italy.
The Belforte castle is a medieval castle located in Sportomaggiore in the province of Trento (Italy). It is a ruined castle that I thought looked picturesque and that I could use to create a similar environment in Unreal Engine combined with a touch of fantasy. I wanted to blend the realistic style of this Italian castle with a fantasy environment with a vibe similar to Sekiro or a Souls game (FromSoftware, 2019) such as Demon’s Souls (Bluepoint Games, Japan Studios, 2020).
I wanted to have the castle standing on a mountain that raised above the skies. Despite the castle was well protected and in a safe location on the top of a mountain, the attack from the enemies was too powerful for the defence forces.
I modelled the tower and basic wall shapes in Blender. After, I imported them in Unreal Engine to create to details using the Quixel Megascan materials and the modelling tool of the UE editor. The workflow consisted in using the shader material alongside the depth map to create details with the Displacement tool in UE. Sometimes I would use the boolean operator to add destruction to the meshed and cut them to form new shapes. When I was happy about the result, I would use the simplify tool to optimise the meshes.
Although I had a very limited time to create this environment, I am fairly satisfied with the result and will likely keep working on it. The current design does not have all the rooms and caves I would have wanted that will create an enjoyable playable map. However, I created various routes for a player to explore the level.
Regarding the broken walls, I used the Blender add on Cell Fracture. This comes standard with Blender and it is super easy to use. I exported the wall mesh from UE to Blender, fractured the mesh, converted it to static mesh and reimported it to UE.
Another key tool that is available in UE is the Transform UVs. This worked well to remove texture repetition from meshes using the same texture. Regarding the falling particles effect’ I used the autumn leaves I created a couple of weeks ago alongside the Niagara tools in UE. There are various ways to create falling particles, but I used the Hanging Particulates with a Mesh renderer. About the leaves on the ground, I used the physical layout tool as in my previous blog.
The video render of the project is available here: Development Project 2 Video – Ruined Castle.mp4
This project would need to be polished and developed further. I had issues because I had to transfer the project over to a Mac computer. Unfortunately, some of the features did not work and I had several issues with the landscape tools. For some reasons, all the tools to smooth and erode the landscape would not work correctly and were just not useful. This made the development process considerably harder. Also, the local height fog feature does not seem to work correctly on mac computers. I will open a case on the Epic Games Dev Community site to check whether there is an easy solution already available.
References:
Battiston, L. A. (2024) Castle Ruins. Unreleased.
Blender (2024) Blender. Available at: https://www.blender.org/ (Accessed 12 Jan 2024)
Epic Games (2024) Unreal Engine Available at: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US (Accessed 16 Jan 2024)
Quixel (2024) Megascans Available at: https://quixel.com/megascans/ (Accessed 16 Jan 2024)
Saeid Gholizade (2021) Physical Layout Tool Available at: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/349bf2d4b1a945fa8f31db80fabf8058? (Accessed 13 Jan 2024)
Trentino Film Commission (2021) Belfort Castle Available at: https://www.trentinofilmcommission.it/en/locations/detail/belfort-castle/ (Accessed 16 Jan 2024)
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