The team at Obsidian, developers of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 among many other games, has been spending some time in Unreal Engine 4 building some seriously detailed Star Wars maps. But this isn’t for a new game – they promise. Instead, the team wanted to get used to Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 and see what it could do on modern PC hardware. As any craftsman knows, you don’t get used to a new toolset while building your masterpiece – you start with scraps, something you’re not going to sell.
So, the team built one of the most iconic environments of the original Star Wars trilogy, Mos Eisley.
“This is a just-for-fun personal project that we are all contributing to for no reason other than we are all a bunch of super Star Wars fans and thought it would be a good time to jump in and produce a quality fan art project,” wrote Jason Lewis, senior environment artist at Obsidian, in the blog post detailing the process. “In addition to just being a bunch of super Star Wars nerds, several of us have been wanting an excuse to learn Unreal 4 for some time now, so we figured that this was a perfect opportunity.”
Lewis goes into deep detail in the blog post about what all’s going on in the scene – from how many polygons built the Millennium Falcon shown in the video above to how the lighting in the scene works.
The project was originally just going to be the Falcon in Docking Bay 94, but it grew from there. For a quick look, you can check out the video above and the other five video segments on Lewis’ YouTube channel.
There are even links to download the current build of the level on Lewis’ blog or via links in the YouTube videos’ descriptions, if you’re brave enough to try to get it running.
This is serious fan-love executed by long-time industry veterans, and it’s pretty awesome.
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