3d designer Thomas Valdieri talked a little bit about his nice little vehicle project with Unreal Engine 4.
3d designer Thomas Valdieri from Moebius Studios has recently shared a very interesting video of an interactive vehicle, rendered and assembled in Unreal Engine 4. Project Nissan grew from a real proposal for the automotive maker Nissan. There’s still a lot of mystery about it (confidentiality agreements), but we do have tiny details from the artists himself.
The model of the car was created from a basic mesh, which was done for the previous project at Moebius Studios. All the modeling process and unwrapping was done with 3DS Max. I have to admit, it was a lot of work. I had to spend a lot of time unwrapping, modeling, creating an environment and preparing all the assets for UE4. It took me about 3 weeks, working 10 hours a day. No weekends, nothing like that.
Once I was inside Unreal, the first thing I did was the lighting. I did this before the shaders, because I needed faster previews. I just used “artificial lighting”. No skylights or directional lights. After I felt comfortable with the lights, I’ve started my work on the shaders. And only after that, it was time to do the interactive content.
I have to admit that I got no programming experience. UE4 is an incredible opportunity to learn a visual programming tool. I learned Blueprint system during 3 weeks of intense study. Blueprints in the project are quite complex, so it was a great challenge for me. Making the lighting of car work with Blueprints was not too hard, once you understand how Blueprints function. Epic actually provides pretty decent program documentation.
Last step was setting up the cameras, which are also full of Blueprints. Unfortunately this project is not available to the public and cannot be on sale. But I do want to try to develop some other content for Unreal Marketplace in the future.
You can check out some of the work Thomas does for Moebius Studios right over here (Facebook.com/MoebiusCG).