Epic Minas Tirith (The Lord of The Rings) With Unreal Engine 5

So, I spent the last two months re-creating the epic city of Minas Tirith from The Lord of the Rings. I used my basic modeling and archviz skills in 3ds Max to create the city, but then had a lot of extra things to learn when it came to creating the environment in Unreal. These skills are not something I use in my daily professional workflows, but I absolutely think they could/should be. I'm always in favor of learning new skills/software and exploring how they can enhance my current work. In this case, Unreal Engine is absolutely incredible for creating cinematic animations in real time. There is just no way to beat it for tasks like this one, in my opinion. These are still shots of what the finished project looked like, but I also rendered 21 different cinematic animations of the city. Here are some stats from the project: city was modeled in 3ds Max and has 904k polygons materials were initially created with V-Ray, then later translated to Unreal using Datasmith. Eventually I replaced a lot of them with custom UE materials I made, or with Megascans materials in Unreal. the environment was created entirely using Unreal Engine -- mostly landscape tools, lighting techniques, and Megascans assets. The animations ranged from 700-1400 frames and were rendering in about 2 hrs per at HD resolution. The lighting is completely done using Lumen real time lighting The project took me 45-50 hours overall I made a complete "making of" video of the entire process. If you want to see that and the final cinematics, click the associated video link.

Software: modeling in 3ds Max + V-Ray, transfer to real time using Datasmith, Environment and animation in Unreal Engine 5

Posted on 19.04.2024

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