Creating a medieval street scene in Blender / UE5

in this tutorial I will show you how I created this medieval street scene in blender and I'll also show you how I exported this to the Unreal Engine 5 game engine so the total production time was around 70 days and this included working on all the buildings working on the street environment adding the props in the scene and after all that work I did some realtime editing in the viewport and with some compositing I was able to tweak the colors so I had this pretty image so all assets came from poly Haven this is a free platform for models taxes and skies you don't need any registration just click on your asset and you can download it we also offer a plug-in that you can download and install in blender and you have all the Assets in your uh view Port so you click on the asset you want you drag this in your scene and you put it somewhere where you want it and uh it's done so you all have the notes setup and textures applied so that's really easy to go so this video has five parts so let's jump to part number one and that is doing your research very important so the first thing I did was creating a Trello page I collected some sketches photo old photographs um also some paintings and old maps and I added all of this cont content on the trell page it's very easy for me to find references when I needed it so part number two is making a scene blockout so when I did the research I made a bunch of photos from the scene and I imported this in reality capture and reality capture made this 3D reconstruction of the scene that allows me to make this blockout so I imported a plane and started to extrude this and aligning this plane to the 3D scan it's a little bit time consuming to get this right but the result is so great that you have a oneon-one copy of the real thing so that is pretty great so when finished with the blockout I started to scope the terrain very important when you want to have a natural look that doesn't look so straight next part was blocking out all the buildings it was a total of 11 buildings so having a good blockout saves you a lot of time because you know a little bit what part you want to make and what part you want to skip for example the building I'm creating right here only needs a front design and this building on the side has a front and a left side so I'm spending some time on the details that I want to create in the final version of the scene so when everything is done I just depict a color in the scene so uh that works for picking a composition and after removing the photo scan you can see that all buildings are in the scene and they represent a real building in the photo scan so then I grab the camera and picking a nice composition and then we arrive on part number three and that is constructing the buildings so I start with a simple uh Cube and I deform it cutting some holes making the ornaments on it uh using some reference files and then doing the Shader um starting sometimes very simple but then I started to make it more and more complex for this building I photos scann some ornaments that give some realistic touch in the final result and I jumped to other buildings uh this was the main buildings on the corner and the Shader looks simple but everything in this setup is displaced so I will show you how that works in this part I had a photo um with a bow and I used a display texture to toque some brick from it and making this bow with all different colors uh and in the final result you could see that it is a displaced Arch ornament uh when you get close to the render you can really see it is displaced with a Sandstone border and a bow and the original texture what is pretty complex to create but in the final result it looks amazing so some buildings are really complex like this one because it has a left and a front side uh same here all types of arch ornaments it has a very complex front facade uh and for the side wall I mixed three types of textures a dark one a white one and a red one and they all have a different sort of displacement map what makes the Shader very satisfying so I just want to show you some more buildings like this one I had just a glimp of a sketch and I tried to recreate it uh this was another building on the side which is pretty visible and it has a very nice sort of of ornament on the top of the windows and I made a photo scan of that and Ma this on the building and yeah this just simple Parts what makes your building special and then we arrive at part number four and that is constructing the base so I started with blending two Cobblestone textures and the hard part in the scene it has a Bow Bridge so I had to find this in real life uh I made a photo scan imported this in reality capture and was able to bake this out project this on the bridge so I started surrounding this with some sens on blocks and then importing all the main structures in the scene so slowly uh the scene gets some shape uh in the scene in the background you can see I added some placeholders because I wasn't finished with the scene yet then I imported the trees and the sunlight and started to play with the uh environment lighting and I also updated the base layer with adding some extra textures also some Strokes for some nice details I spent some time on working on these side step that's nice for the composition in the scene that it adds some extra depth when making a render So speaking of rendering let's go to render the scene in part number five so when making the first render the background was very empty uh and I had to make some new buildings uh from some reference files to fill this empty spot with two nice looking buildings so when they were finished I imported them in blender and when looking at the composition it looks way better so when making a new render the left and the middle part of the render looks a little bit empty so I went to the original location and I was able to photos scan some side step for the buildings imported these in reality capture and bake them out so I could easily import them in the main scene so I needed some Sandstone border stones to blend them easily with the Cobblestone floor and then I imported the characters and animals and then it was time to make the final render so now it's finally time to export for the scene to inre Engine 5 in part number six so I choose to bake out all the textures because the Shader was very complex and I had some issues exporting this to the engine so I baked the diffuse normal and the displacement map for the base and all the buildings and then I export this to the Unreal Engine so after doing that I aligned all the buildings same as I did in blender and then I had a real time scene so from the tough view you can see that the rear is empty and that was just an optimization thing and when you get really close to the buildings you can see that everything is displaced and this was only possible because Unreal Engine 5 now has n and that allows you to import high resolution mashes so as a little extra I added some weather effect so I added some rain my favorite weather effect was the snow because the buildings looks the best with some snow on the rooftops so thanks for watching this video and I hope you have some fun with working on blender environments

Channel: CG Masterclass

Views: 20,626

Keywords: Blender, cycles, 3D, exterior, training, UE5, 4.0, environment

Id: hJbQxMldBVw

Length: 8min 41sec (521 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2024