The Lord of the Rings in Unreal Engine 4. Gondor - Minas Tirith

My goal was to create one of my favorite parts of Middle earth, Gondor, so that you could explore it as a vast and breathing Photogrammetry environment rendered in Unreal Engine 4.
I wanted it to be a realistic game environment both in terms of look and performance. I wanted it to feel dynamic so that the grass bend when you run through it, wind swaying the trees and clouds rolling over the mountain tops.

Big thanks to my mentor John Troive at EA DICE and our teacher Daniel Henefalk at Embark Studios.

All assets are made by me using similar workflow used at EA DICE for projects like Star Wars™ Battlefront™. I took this opportunity to deepen my Photogrametry asset creation, the use of Lidar terrain data and also creating my own foliage normal map textures using my home built flash setup. Everything is delighted and calibrated using SRGB color checker. Maps and shaders are setup according to PBR standards. Detail textures are used to preserve consistent high texel density on assets. The Terrain Lidar is from the actual movie location used in Peter Jackson interpretation of J.R. R Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings.

This is a five-week intense passion project made with love for Lord of the Rings and Game Making. Right now I'm working on setting up my Uruk Hai model that I made during the character course at FutureGames so that you can explore the grassy fields of Gondor surrounding Minas Tirith in third person. This will come in a later post so stay tuned!