Japan’s borders might be closed to foreign visitors for a few more weeks, but one artist has managed to create a stunning replica of that country’s Etchu-Daimon train station inside of Unreal Engine 5 that’s well worth visiting.
With some added effects from the Lumen lighting software, 3D artist Lorenzo Drago did all the modeling, texturing, and animation in the video that’s embedded below. The end result is an astonishingly realistic recreation of the train station that was built entirely from reference material and by hand, minus the foliage that was provided by Quixel Megascans.
“For this project, I wanted to get as close to photorealism as possible,” Drago explained on his ArtStation account. “I used camera matching to get accurate proportions and made careful use of reference. I adjusted the measurements afterwards to help with modularity. Aside from detail textures and alphas created from photographs, I created all textures from scratch in Painter and made custom materials in Unreal for use with vertex painting or masks to break up repetition.”
To get the video feeling like it had been shot on a handheld camera, Drago said that he used real-time VR tracking to emulate the effect. While you shouldn’t expect future games built in the Unreal Engine 5 to boast this level of fidelity yet, Drago’s project is a great example of what Epic’s new software is capable of.
Since it officially launched last month, Unreal 5 has been adopted by a number of studios that are using it to develop their next games. The next Witcher game has switched from CD Projekt Red’s internal engine to Unreal, Crystal Dynamics has begun work on a new Tomb Raider with the software, and Gears of War developer The Coalition recently showed off some of its latest Unreal Engine 5 projects.
Source: Gamespot
