Uruk-Hai from The Lord of the Rings in Unreal Engine 4

For this project my goal was to create an Uruk-Hai to explore the realm of Gondor. He needed to feel like a part of the world and affected by the environment and the harsh life of a brutal warrior of Middle-Earth. I wanted to capture the material contrast of the blackened armor, heavy leather, rough skin and long flowing hair. I wanted the light leather and hair to move dynamically when running over the grassy hills.

To make him fit into my calibrated Gondor level I decided to ground him in reality by using real life blackened rusty armor and leather for the materials.
The materials are captured using photogrammetry, calibrated using color checker and setup using PBR standards. It was amazing to have the armor pieces at hand as real life reference for how the material behaves and how they are applied on the surfaces.

I have a huge interest in game hair and making hair is something i really enjoy doing. The hair texture atlas is made using XGen and the hair clumps are hand placed with twist and bend deformers looking at Johan Lithvall's workflow. For hair shader and maps I looked at Unreal Engine 4 Documentation.

Using my custom scanned and calibrated tiling materials made out of real life armor in combination with generators within substance painter was a key takeaway for this project and i will definitely do more of that in upcoming works.

Meshes are made with Maya and Zbrush and I made sure to have them ready for our tech art class with Jona Marklund from Fatshark so that i could rig him during that time. It was also really fun to animate him and see him come to life afterwards.

The skin is painted in Substance Painter closely looking at references from Weta Workshop and Behind the Scenes pictures from The Lord of the Rings triology.

To get more movement in the loincloth and the hair i added cloth physics in Unreal. All pictures and gifs are rendered in Unreal engine. Some of them in my Gondor level and some in an Unreal engine studio level to better show the materials.

Im happy to finally share this project with you and i hope you will enjoy it as much as i did creating him.