An environmental artist with a passion for Star Wars has realised the iconic location of Star Wars’ Mos Eisley space port in jaw-dropping detail via Unreal Engine 4. What’s more, it’s coming to VR soon and you can download the demo now.
John Lewis is an Environmental Artist for Obsidian Entertainment, developers behind games such as Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout: New Vegas. On a whim and as a Star Wars fan, he decided it’d be cool if he could a virtual build the docking bay (No. 94 as any Star Wars fan should know) located in Mos Eisley, Tatooine, the “hive of scum and villainy” from the original (sorry, ‘fourth’) Star Wars instalment. That’s how it began.
However, Lewis’ his ambitions for the project soon expanded, and eventually he realised that he really wanted to wander beyond the docking bay into the rest of Mos Eisley and visit the other iconic movie set, the Cantina where Luke Skywalker, Obi-wan Kenobi meet the Falcon’s owners, Han Solo and Chewbacca, for the first time. He needed help, so he enlisted his co-workers from Obsidian, quite rightly all Star Wars super-fans too, to the point where up to 17 people have now contributed.
“In addition to myself, the other artists working with me on this project all currently work for Obsidian as well, from additional senior artists, to mid-range and junior artists as well, ” says Lewis, writing for 80.lv, “We even have someone on the QA team contributing some artwork as well. In total there are 17 people contributing to this project in varying capacities. 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 with all the Star Wars awesomeness going on these days, we all thought it would be a good time to jump in and produce a quality fan art project. 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.”
The resulting environments, rendered capably using Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, are some of the most detailed and realistic recreations I’ve ever seen. Indeed, Lewis admits that his ambitions were lofty on this front. “… my goal was to build the most highly detailed real-time Falcon that anyone has ever seen, and I think I have pulled it off, except for maybe the Falcon model from the recent ILM X-Labs VR demo …”. Tie fighters, X-Wing fighters and an Imperial Shuttle are all to be found whilst wandering around the environments.
You can find download link mirrors in the description of the video over on YouTube. I’ve included them below for reference, but it’s likely that (being Google Drive links) these will hit limits soon enough.
Mirror#1 – https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B48A…
Mirror#2 – https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzdD…
Mirror#3 – https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9zH…
Mirror#4 – https://drive.google.com/folderview?i…
Mirror#5 – https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwT…
The icing on the cake of course is that, being built in UE4, the demo should be relatively easy to add virtual reality support to, and indeed this is next on the horizon for the team. “We are also working on a VR version as well as several people in the group have been playing around with Occulus and Vive VR kits,” says Lewis, “and we thought it would be cool to have a version that runs in VR, so we are currently trying to get that finished as well.”
The team have made the demo available to the public to download now. Although be quick, this kind of super-high quality work will likely draw the eye of new Lucasfilm (and therefore Star Wars) owners Disney. In the mean time, checking out Lewis’ full blog on the project is highly recommended.