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Employees at Obsidian Entertainment have been experimenting with Unreal Engine 4 to create highly detailed virtual environments from Star Wars.
The project saw 17 developers and artists collaborating, with senior environment artist Jason Lewis stressing that “this is a just-for-fun personal project that we are all contributing to for no reason other than we are all a bunch of super Super Wars fans”.
He added this was also an opportunity to learn how to use Epic Games’ popular engine – perhaps ahead of a future Obsidian project. The team worked on it in their free time.
The project began with the Millennium Falcon sitting in Mos Eisley’s Docking Bay 94 and gradually expanded to include more interiors, more vehices and more of the city itself, including the iconic cantina.
The team is close to completion and hopes to later put the virtual environment online as a free download – as Lewis puts it: “not really a game, more just an interactive fan art piece”. A VR version is also in the works.
Aiming for as high a level of detail as possible, Lewis’ Falcon is made from 700,000 triangles, while the docking bay and surrounding props are another 500,000. Polygon counts in certain parts of the environment can exceed 1m.
You can read more about the process at 80.lv and check out some of the best screenshots below. Click for larger versions.
