MAKING MOS EISLEY
Advice on using Unreal Engine 4, Substance, Quixel and more
When a group of artists from game developer Obsidian Entertainment got together to create a personal project based around the Star Wars universe, it was always going to be something special. (You can download the UE4 experience from our Vault.)
“The project started out with wanting to build the most highly detailed real-time Millennium Falcon that anyone had ever seen,” says Jason Lewis, who along with friend Terry Hess were the original artists on the project. “I am a huge Star Wars fan and I have always wanted to build a CG Falcon, but just never seemed to get around to doing it until now. 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, and since I had no Unreal Engine 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 couple months ago!”
But the idea spiralled. Why create a stunning rendition of the Millennium Falcon and not have a place for it to be shown of? “We then thought it would be neat if we put it into a game engine and have the ability to walk around it. Docking bay 94 was born.”
Originally it was just going to be the Falcon sitting in Docking Bay 94, “so I could run around and look at it in real-time,” says Terry. “Then I thought it would be neat to add the interior to the docking bay, and then some of the surrounding Mos Eisley city, then I thought, 'Hey, let’s put the Mos Eisley Cantina in as well'. It was at this point that I realised the scope of this project had grown beyond my ability to finish it by myself.”
As plans took shape to build the Millennium Falcon, docking bay and
THE other artists all currently work for obsidian; THERE were senior, Mid-range and junior artists Jason Lewis, lead artist, Obsidian Entertainment
a small portion of the city, Mos Eisley, it became apparent the scope of the project was too big for just two people. Jason Lewis and Terry Hess asked fellow artists at Obsidian Entertainment if they would be interested in helping create the scene and in the process familiarise themselves with Unreal Engine 4 in their spare time.
The response was overwhelming from the other Star Wars fans at the studio. “The other artists who worked with me on this project all currently work for Obsidian as well; there were senior artists, and midrange and junior artists as well. We even had someone on the QA team contributing some artwork,” says Jason.
“We had a total of 17 people contributing with varying experience and skill sets. Environment artists, prop artists, VFX and lighting artists as well as animation and QA, all ranging from junior to senior,” says Terry.
Jason explains further: “Roles were determined based on the level of commitment people were willing to put into it. We had two project leads, four senior artists, five intermediate artists, one junior artist, two effects artists, one lighting artist, and two animators.”
What began as a simple project to model the Millennium Falcon quickly grew into a complex interactive art piece: This recreation of one of Star Wars’ most famous environments enables you to walk around its sandy alleyways in first-person. You can run around with a blaster, but the team were unable to enlist the help of any
character artists, “so the only characters in the environment with you are a bunch of astromech droids and a few Gonk droids,” says Jason.
Stay organised
Organising the team became a priority and it fell to the two founding members, Jason and Terry, to become project leads. The work was divided between two teams of artists each submitting models and concepts back to either Terry or Jason. One team managed the docking bays, all interior spaces, and the lighting; the second handled the exterior city. Work was then split up by interior and exterior, and then broken down by structures, vehicles and props.
Everything began with references notes, so early in the project Terry and Jason went through lots of Star Wars material, movies, games, books, and pulled out screenshots and descriptions of all the assets they wanted for our environment, and passed those out to the various artists. “Since this was done in our free time, it was more of a free for all as to who would do what asset. People picked assets they were comfortable creating,” says Terry.
Asset work was also divided into two lists, “the essential stuff”, remembers Jason, “and the ‘would be nice to have’ list. Surprisingly we got through all the essentials, and almost all of the would be nice to haves as well.”
A simple Word document was used to keep track of assets, references and work. New methods One of the goals of the project was as an experiment to see just how much polygonal and texture detail could run on modern PC graphics hardware at acceptable frame rates. “As a result we are pushing some rather high-polygon counts and texture sizes. We are doing some modularity, but on a more macro scale.
surprisingly we got Through all THE Essentials, and almost all of THE ‘would be nice To haves’ as well Jason Lewis, lead artist, Obsidian Entertainment
Buildings were instanced, the entire docking bay is reused three times in the level, some of the props are reused, but we are not doing much micro-level modularity,” says Jason.
Because of the scale of the project the artists developed some new ways of working. “We developed several new pipelines that we will be using in our development day jobs,” says Jason. “We came up with a prop asset pipeline that allowed us to build visually high-detail props very quickly utilising many newer art tools that have become popular over the last couple of years.”
Most of the team are 3ds Max users, and the pipeline begins with building out the final low-poly mesh, then the high-ploy mesh is built for baking, “our high-poly meshes are typically only used to generate bevelled edges in our normal maps. Small micro normal map details are painted or sculpted in using Zbrush, Quixel, or Substance Painter,” says Jason. Then it’s time to bake Tangent Space Normal Maps/ AO Maps/and Curvature Maps; micro details are added to the normal, AO and curvature maps; and the final pass is done in Quixel Suite or Substance Painter.
“The workflow developed for the Millennium Falcon (read about this on page 34) has given us some good insight