Epic Games has released assets from the “A Boy and his Kite” Demo that was demonstrated at its GDC 2015 session. The pack is free, but requires and Epic Games account.
“For larger assets such as rocks, ground tiles, cliffs faces and tree trunks, reconstruction was performed directly from photographs using a process called photogrammetry. These assets were then put through a proprietary ‘de-lighting’ process to make them suitable for use in any lighting scenario. Specular and roughness maps where then created to take full advantage of Unreal Engine 4’s Physically Based Rendering architecture. Finally game-optimized assets were generated with normal maps, LODs and collision meshes.
For vegetation such as flowers, bushes and grass we used color calibrated reference photography shot in the field to more accurately model and texture these assets.”
A collection of realistic assets from Epic’s Open World demo shown at GDC 2015. Use them to create new levels or add them to existing ones.
Description
About this pack:
Each asset has been created using photographs of a real world object.
Our Process:
For larger assets such as rocks, ground tiles, cliffs faces and tree trunks, reconstruction was performed directly from photographs using a process called photogrammetry. These assets were then put through a proprietary ‘de-lighting’ process to make them suitable for use in any lighting scenario. Specular and roughness maps where then created to take full advantage of Unreal Engine 4’s Physically Based Rendering architecture. Finally game-optimized assets were generated with normal maps, LODs and collision meshes.
For vegetation such as flowers, bushes and grass we used color calibrated reference photography shot in the field to more accurately model and texture these assets.
Technical Details
This pack weights around 6.3GB and here are its key features:
-42 Photo-realistic meshes with LODs
-17 Foliage
-21 Rocks
– 4 Trees
-138 Textures from 2048 up to 8192
-14 Tiling Ground Materials with Normal and Displacement maps
The Demo can be downloaded here.
The “A Boy and his Kite Demo” definitely proves the potential of Unreal Engine 4 in rendering open world environments with extreme detail, and demonstrates the visual quality developers will be able to achieve in their games.
It’s certainly exciting to see this level of visual fidelity to be possible with a widely used engine like Unreal Engine 4, and with the implementation of Nvidia’s VXGI within the engine, the potential is immense. Lets hope we start seeing similar results in games really soon. You can check out our previous coverage of Unreal Engine 4 projects, here and here.
