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For years now i have been absolutely obsessed with extreme graphics quality in games. A few years ago i saw some videos on youtube proving what unreal engine is capable of. I've made a few games, mostly for hobby and school projects in Unity3D. I made procedurally generated islands similar to rust with lakes, water sources and plenty of biodiversity.
I stumbled upon a video by quixel megascans, a company that scans objects and materials for in-game textures whilst taking a shit where they recreated Dust 2 with stunning graphics. And as we all know, the best ideas come to life while doing a number two! I figured, hey, this looks easy as hell, i'm going to do this to paralake!
I've already did some testing as some of you might've seen in the shoutbox, i've extracted the few materials in the paralake .bsp file and i've decompiled the map content. I then seperated the textures from all models, cleaned up some unessesary files. I've then imported these using a tool called 'HammUEr' for Unreal Engine. This allows me to import Source engime maps over to unreal.
This is definitely not the best way, but its the fastest. First i tried decompiling the map back to an obj file using tools like VIDE and 3DSMax. This does work however in multiple attempts i was only able to import the map as a single mesh and while thats great for performance it made it very difficult to apply textures to premade structures. I'd have to rebuild buildings object by object and wall by wall which would be extremely time consuming. Using HammUEr brings in certain glithces aswell but those might only take a few hours time in total to fix. It does import the entire map as seperate meshes including their textures meaning replacing them will be a matter of drag and dropping, and modifications can just be done over the existing meshes.
As in the Dust 2 video above i will be using quixel megascans for the largest part of this project. Some people did ask me if i could livestream, which i will do so i can edit them into a daily progress video but especially in the beginning there will be a lot of time spend waiting for textures and lights to bake and compile and builds to load. Im also not an expert with Unreal at all as most of my knowledge is in c# and Unity and unreal goes into c++. I will add vehicles, maybe the monorail and a boat in, so anyone can explore the map if they wish when im done with it. Just doing this to kill some time because of COVID, and i always wanted an excuse to work with Unreal anyways.
I stumbled upon a video by quixel megascans, a company that scans objects and materials for in-game textures whilst taking a shit where they recreated Dust 2 with stunning graphics. And as we all know, the best ideas come to life while doing a number two! I figured, hey, this looks easy as hell, i'm going to do this to paralake!
I've already did some testing as some of you might've seen in the shoutbox, i've extracted the few materials in the paralake .bsp file and i've decompiled the map content. I then seperated the textures from all models, cleaned up some unessesary files. I've then imported these using a tool called 'HammUEr' for Unreal Engine. This allows me to import Source engime maps over to unreal.
This is definitely not the best way, but its the fastest. First i tried decompiling the map back to an obj file using tools like VIDE and 3DSMax. This does work however in multiple attempts i was only able to import the map as a single mesh and while thats great for performance it made it very difficult to apply textures to premade structures. I'd have to rebuild buildings object by object and wall by wall which would be extremely time consuming. Using HammUEr brings in certain glithces aswell but those might only take a few hours time in total to fix. It does import the entire map as seperate meshes including their textures meaning replacing them will be a matter of drag and dropping, and modifications can just be done over the existing meshes.
As in the Dust 2 video above i will be using quixel megascans for the largest part of this project. Some people did ask me if i could livestream, which i will do so i can edit them into a daily progress video but especially in the beginning there will be a lot of time spend waiting for textures and lights to bake and compile and builds to load. Im also not an expert with Unreal at all as most of my knowledge is in c# and Unity and unreal goes into c++. I will add vehicles, maybe the monorail and a boat in, so anyone can explore the map if they wish when im done with it. Just doing this to kill some time because of COVID, and i always wanted an excuse to work with Unreal anyways.
