I put N64 graphics into Unreal Engine

[Music] this is a level for a game i'm creating titled 1164. the game features an n64 inspired visual style and it's running in unreal engine in this video i'll go over some of the steps i went through in order to create it [Music] before creating anything the first thing i did was head into google and do a quick search for japanese style buildings from there i was able to save them into a small gallery which i plan to use for reference as soon as i felt i had a good amount of reference i went ahead and drew this sketch of how i wanted the final environment to look i would end up using this as the basis for my block out i kept the castle's blockout very simple as i knew i'd be making changes to this as i continued with that done i exported it and brought it into unreal engine it's incredibly helpful to bring your environment into your game engine as soon as possible it helps you get a good sense of scale and determine what you might need to change later on once it was in engine it was time to have some quick lighting so i can actually see what i was doing and then it was back into maya to add some landscape elements [Music] i created a low poly tree and started spamming around my scene i didn't really care about the triangle count at this point as this was really just part of the block out to help me get a sense of how the environment was going to look with the landscape more or less done i re-exported it out of maya and brought it back into unreal engine i gave the level's lighting a bit of a tweak and then it was time to explore the new blockout [Music] [Applause] [Music] i liked how the environment was looking so far so i decided it was time to bring some textures into the scene keeping in mind my original sketch i created some low resolution textures to use in my model [Music] with my early textures in place it was once again time to bring the model back into unreal engine [Music] my textures are set up for a technique called texture analysing this means that when i bring in a new material into unreal engine i only have to import one large texture map as opposed to hundreds of smaller ones seeing the environment with textures really helped i realized that it was just too small and wasn't creating the right kind of atmosphere that i was going for so it was time to go back to maya and rework the block out a bit [Music] i ended up doubling the size of the castle because i felt the original design was just a little too welcoming i wanted to create a structure that was going to loom over the player and create a sense of foreboding i've been experimenting with this style for a while now so i already had a lot of textures that i had used for previous models and i really liked some of these so i wanted to take them and use them as a base for the next batch of textures for this building i love these red beams and pillars they just scream sacred temple to me so i really wanted to incorporate them into the new design of the building using my texture hammers i began creating some models for the new castle i made use of as much reference as possible because i really wanted to nail that japanese temple style [Music] in a real n64 game the textures would be tiled for uv mapping in my case i've actually tiled the textures through the geometry itself that's why there's so many divisions on the mesh this may seem like more trouble than it's worth but it's actually going to be of incredible help to me when i bring it into unreal engine to do the lighting in the end i actually strayed pretty far away from my original design but that's okay i really prefer the look of this it's got more of a spiritual vibe to it and i'm hoping it's going to serve the purpose of the story a lot better with the redesign complete it was time to bring it once more into unreal engine gorgeous just gorgeous darling but it's really missing something uh it's time for the landscape to get its own update so now i'm going to add a bunch of vegetation and some greenery to the area oh honestly for me this is probably the most important part of environment design because once you have some greenery it really helps ground your architecture and make it feel a lot more realistic originally my idea was to have this place be set somewhere in the mountains but seeing it in unreal engine it just felt like something was missing to me i also felt the red textures were perhaps a little too saturated so i wanted to add more green to the building and just make it feel more overgrown and creepy the final scene is about 4500 triangles it was quite a challenge trying to find something that would look good but also have a realistic triangle count that would appear on the n64 4500 triangles may seem like a lot for a single level but you have to keep in mind that in many cases the triangle count has been doubled here due to my texture atlasing technique the biggest culprit is the castle itself which is about 3 000 triangles the surrounding landscape is obviously a lot lighter than that also keep in mind this is going to come into unreal engine as a single asset with a single texture so when compared to a modern game that's pretty well optimized here you can see a side-by-side comparison of how this model might look if it was actually running on an n64 it's under a thousand triangles which is quite a big difference when compared to the custom texture atlas model which is tiling its texture through the geometry which sits at about 16 000 triangles and if you weren't sold let's take a look at an example from the legend of zelda ocarina of time this is hyrule field and i've created it using the same texture atlas method so everything you see here is using a single texture i used this for my own guardian video where i put the guardians from breath of the wild into ocarina of time i just wanted to use this as an example to illustrate that the triangle count will increase quite a lot when you use the texture atlas method now i'm sure there's some people out there who still think this is too high poly to be on the n64 and to you i say let me introduce you to banjo-tooie welcome to mayhem temple this one stage is a whopping 6272 triangles i don't know what wizardry they pulled to get this to run on the n64 but it just goes to show you you can have some pretty high poly environments for your n64 games [Music] with the environment completed in maya i once again brought it into unreal engine and this is where using a single texture and material comes in handy because now i can add a bunch of effects to imitate the lighting that would appear on the n64 what you see here is essentially a fog that i baked into the shader itself and it's controlled by the distance away from the camera so the closer you get to it the more clarity you have of the texture and the further away you go the more silhouetted the model becomes [Music] and of course there's atmospheric fog which i overlay on top of that for an additional bit of ambience notice how you can control the color to determine the mood you want to create i took some time to play around with the settings until i found something i was happy with i chose to go for a lighter fog as i wanted to create a more mysterious vibe than something downright horrifying like silent hill for example one thing i love about old video games is how they cheated with the lighting and i definitely wanted to recreate the light beams seen in the temple of time in the legend of zelda it's a translucent emissive material mapped to a cube pretty simple but effective in much the same way i also added an additional row of trees using a translucent emissive material to add some life and movement to the environment i threw in this particle effect system i had swapped the trees out to these sakura blossoms and that gave me the perfect excuse to have these petals flowing in the wind these flickering torches were created using a flip book node this allows me to control the rate of the flicker effect in my main material i'm also able to control the emissive strength once again this is all controlled for a single material so the lighting itself is actually baked into this master material my main inspiration for this was the torches seen in ocarina of time i've overlaid the torch with a lens flare effect which i'll disable so you can appreciate the flicker material by adjusting these values i can have complete control over the strength of the light and the speed of the flicker effect the lens flare itself was perhaps the trickiest thing to set up i wanted to replicate the old gaming trick of having a texture face the player no matter where they are in the scene it took some trial and error but i was finally able to find a result that i was quite happy with [Music] i also needed to make sure that the lens flare itself would be rendered on top of the torch and not through it this also took a little bit of time the japanese style lanterns in the back are also set up using the exact same methods [Music] with these tricks in place it was a simple case of messing around with the effects until i found a result i was happy with [Music] thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed it and found it informative i'm currently working on this game in my free time so if you'd like to support the project please consider checking out my patreon the link is in the video description if not i'd really appreciate a like and subscribe i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Legend 64

Views: 9,017

Keywords: Unreal engine, Ue5, N64 graphics, N64 home brew, Zelda64, Legend64

Id: tPuIbGO_954

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Tricky_Rub956]

Talking about your polycounts like they are large. Whole scene is lower than some props I've made haha cool idea and pulled it off nicely.

[u/MozTS]

I wish unreal ran well stripped down like this, especially for mobile vr (quest)

[u/Troflecopter]

Finally, a game I could literally run on my toaster.

[u/Chi_20XX]

Fantastic work! I'm pursuing a N64 look for my UE project as well and have found your devlogs inspiring and insightful!

[u/R-500]

Fantastic video. I was curious on how you got the textures to look just like the N64, and the part about your texture atlas solved that question.

I'm interested to see what advances this project will have in the future.