Recreating the Train Station Plaza from Half-Life 2 in UE4

Iván Fernandez shared the production details of his project Half-Life 2 Plaza, a location of iconic City 17 remade in UE4, 3ds Max, ZBrush, and Substance Painter with the help of Quixel Megascans.

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Iván, I am 23 years old and I'm a 3D Artist from Madrid, Spain, specializing in hard-surface. Since childhood, I was very interested in how video games and animation movies are made so I started learning 3D by myself a couple of years ago. Mainly I do 3D modeling as a hobby. I participated in the production of some projects such as “Arma Mod France” where I met very good people; it was my first and unique project that allowed me to showcase my work.

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Half-Life 2 Plaza: References

The idea of making this scene appeared after replaying Half-Life 2 for the tenth time and remembering all the feelings I had when playing this game as a kid as well as recalling how many hours I spent in Valve Hammer Editor making levels. This scene is the first level I have ever done with my own assets. Until now I only create 3D models separately. My main reference was obviously Half-Life 2 and some artworks by other people.

Blockout and Buildings

The beginning of the scene was easy. I took some screenshots from the original level and started blocking directly on Unreal Engine using BSP, trying to get the look as close as possible to the original level.

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When I got a result that I liked, I exported it into 3ds Max and started modeling the buildings according to the size of the blockout and relying on the original buildings as a reference. The truth is, the buildings are quite simple, there are only 8 of them.

The buildings are textured mainly with a vertex paint technique sing tileable textures from Quixel Megascans. Mostly, my materials are not complex and contain parameters to control the scale of the textures, the intensity of the normal, and tint.

In the case of the train station, I wanted to deviate from the original version, so I looked for train stations that resembled the one in the game. The station that more or less resembled what I was looking for was the Nyugati station in Budapest so I made something based on it adapting it to the size of the scene.

What I did was to make modular elements, textured directly in Substance Painter. The configuration of the materials is basic, the necessary part for me was to be able to handle roughness, metallic, the intensity of normal, and tint.

Modeling

Basically, all the models were made in the same way. First, I made a low poly model, then a high poly model, and a bake in Substance Painter. From the smallest models like the stones on the road to the citadel, I followed the same workflow.

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The limitations artists had in those years when Half-Life 2 was made are noticeable and the original environment is somewhat empty compared to the levels that we have in video games today. Because of that, I had a bit of freedom in enriching the environment to my own taste by adding things that did not exist originally.

In my opinion, the assets that have most improved the look of the scene are the leaves from the fallen trees and the small stones on the roads. These are typical details that, if present, are not perceived by the viewer, but if they are not there, you know that something is missing.

For the stones, I created the low poly models with little geometry, then made the high poly in ZBrush and baked. For the fallen leaves, I used Megascans textures and made several types of leaves.

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Once the models were generated I painted them all over the level with the foliage tool.

Materials

The ground is the part that probably took the most effort to achieve the best visual result. Basically, it's a simple model with different materials.

It is different from the buildings as I did not use vertex paint. The most complex material is the cobblestone road because I used parallax occlusion. This is the only material that has parallax occlusion.

Without a doubt, using parallax occlusion in a case like this made all the difference, giving a lot of detail to the overall look of the scene. Since I was quite limited in the resources, tessellation was not an option.

For the rest of the ground materials, it was somewhat different. Like the cobblestone road, these are also made with Megascans textures, with a simple setup.

Besides creating the typical parameters for the normal intensity, texture coordinates, etc., I also added another parameter called dirt. Here, I add any texture – in this case, a Noise – and can make them tiling. The noise allows me to add a greater variety of color to the albedo, making the material look more interesting.

To separate the materials in a more natural way, I created some curbs which gave me very good results. However, I didn't know how to make a decent blend for the cobblestone floor since it was very noticeable that one material parallax occlusion and the others didn't.

In this case, I modeled a cobble model and make a spline with it, getting a good result and saving a lot of time thanks to the flexibility of the splines.

A key point that gave the scene a little bit of Half-Life personality was the decals that we have seen a thousand times when playing the game. Thanks to Jerson Gaming for allowing me to use their remastered decals, they have saved me a lot of work.

The setup of the decals is quite similar to the rest of the materials, with parameters, I was able to control the intensity of the normal, roughness, metallic, etc.

The rest of the decals are either from Quixel Megascans or my own ones made in Substance Painter.

Lighting

The lighting is static and uses the traditional workflow: a Directional Light and a Skylight. The original lighting was warmer, but I preferred a whiter one – in the end, I opted not to recreate the original lighting, because in my opinion, it looked better that way.

Then, I made a couple of cinematics with Sequencer and exported it to get the final shots that you may have already seen.

Conclusion

Without a doubt, the biggest challenge in the project was to finish it. When you don't have a great setup to work with, you are very limited in resources and you can't do things thoughtlessly without considering their impact on performance. This becomes especially obvious when you are trying to do something bigger than what you're used to. Naturally, optimization is what I've learned about the most while working on this project. Optimizing everything as much as possible and trying to get the best possible visual quality has been a challenge. And at this point, I would like to thank Ochounos, a good friend of mine – I have learned a lot thanks to his advice and his feedback certainly made a difference.

Recreating the Train Station Plaza from Half-Life 2 in UE4

Introduction

Half-Life 2 Plaza: References

Blockout and Buildings

Modeling

Materials

Lighting

Conclusion

Iván Fernandez, Hard-Surface Modeler

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev

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