Making THE MILLENNIUM FALCON

Jason Lewis takes us through the creation of the centrepiece of this tech demo

THE first Thing was To break up THE iconic ship into several Pieces, Each with its own unique Material Jason Lewis, lead artist, Obsidian Entertainment

The Millennium Falcon was the inspiration and centre piece of this tech demo. Jason Lewis, senior environment artist at Obsidian Entertainment and lead artist on the Mos Eisley project, had wanted to model the Millennium Falcon in order to explore it in Unreal Engine 4: “The whole project started with just building the Falcon as a real-time model, and then needing an environment to show it off in, then the project just grew from there,” explains Jason.

Jason then put together a team to extend the environment beyond the docking bay. “The goal for the Falcon was to create one of the highest detail real-time models ever,” continues Jason. “So going with that mentality I decided that high-end PC hardware would be needed to run it at smooth framerates, and surprisingly what we produced actually runs pretty well on even mid-range hardware.”

The finished model took Jason eight months of working in his free time to complete; Jason estimates he spent 350 hours developing this one asset. “Overall I am quite happy with the end result of my real-time Falcon model,” says Jason. “I feel I have succeeded in creating the most detailed real-time Falcon model ever.”

In the next steps, Jason outlines his process for creating the famous Falcon…