Paralake in Unreal Engine

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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.
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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.
 

JRW

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imagine if the dev team got behind you and made a standalone would be unreal, really like what ur doing cant wait for the finished product well done, also the FPS would be so much fucking better on a new engine
 
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this is sexy


I think you've done some really great work here, if you're up to it, would be amazing to see all of paralake in UE on a server for some of us to roam around in for a bit, no pressure I guess
 
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Day 2 update

It's 6AM as im writing this and im quite tired, i obviously didn't wake up early lol. I didnt spend a whole lot of time on mapping and modelling today but i did some changes to city hall and created a foundation for the underpass which will make tomorrow a bit more entertaining. Instead, i spend a lot of time learning the cinematic camera in unreal and i completely redid the lighting from scratch, this is the first render i've ever done using the cinematic camera in unreal so its not as smooth, but oh well.

Make sure you enjoy it in it's full 4K 60FPS glory ;)
(It might still be processing, i posted this at 0% processing because i really want to go to bed )
 
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A multiplayer server shouldn't be too difficult!
 
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Day 3 update

Didn't get much done today unfortunately, so no video :(

Unreal engine's 4.25 update came out and i wanted to upgrade to it to various reasons. The texture and material libary i use (Quixel Megascans) has a plugin for unreal which they updated for 4.25 but because of that update my install of 4.24 got completely fucked so i was more or less forced to upgrade. The update is quite broken so tomorrow i need to do alot of reinstalling and have to load in the map from scratch again. Dont worry tho, i haven't lost any progress because of this!

In the meanwhile, enjoy a concept screenshot of the hungries alleyway across the hospital!
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It's been a while since i last did an update, i've been quite busy basically re-doing alot of work. Turns out the export i did was at a wrong scale meaning i had to either scale EVERY thing i used down, or, i couldve just reimport the map on a different scale. I did the latter but couldnt be arsed to reimport all textures, thats why everything looks untextured unlike previous screenshots where you atleast saw other textures.

Besides that my poor shintel CPU has been very hard at work importing 200+ megascans assets aswell as other textures materials and stuff, which took almost 2 days. Since they completely locked up my machine i mostly did this at night.


Regardless, ive put texturing slightly on hold and firstly want to work on the road infrastructure, It will be the biggest undertaking of the project and unlike most buildings these will be a complete restructure of some parts. Obviously, it will resemble the look of paralake but slapping an 8K texture on the hammer designed highways just isn't gonna cut it!

Here are two comparisons of recent work, please dont focus on how dull the lighting looks! This is just a really simple light to show off, i've done 0 work on post-processing things yet.
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