Brú na Bóinne (Newgrange) is a neolithic site in Ireland. My goal was to recreate it in Unreal Engine 5.3 using as much real world data as possible. It must work as a playable level so I had to keep optimisation in mind.
Thanks to The Discovery Programme, Centre for Archaeology and Innovation Ireland, for allowing me use of their laser scan data of the entire Newgrange site. As part of this, I am also participating in 5DCulture, a European initiative aiming to enrich the offerings of 3D digital cultural heritage assets and their reuse in important domains such as education, tourism and the wider cultural and creative sector.
This video is for my second year Environment Design module for BSc Game Design at Leeds Beckett University.
Tools Used
- Unreal Engine 5.3
- MetaShape
- CloudCompare
- zBrush
- 3DS Max
Lasergrammetry
The Discovery Programme provided me with models they had generated from the laser scans, and the raw point cloud data so I could experiment with the work flow for turning the data into game ready assets.
I attempted to make the whole project using just the raw data though in the end used a combination of the models The Discovery Programme provided, and my own models built from the lasergrammetry point cloud data.
Process
- The point clouds were made up of 1,895,338,384 points. To make the models from the point cloud data I used Metashape.
- Then I manually went through the point cloud data and remove things I didn’t want in the final meshes, such as people.
- I grouped the points into distinct segments.
- I then used CloudCompare to reduce the size of the point clouds before trying to generate meshes from them.
- I touched up the generated meshes using zBrush & 3DS Max.
- I assembled all my meshes in 3DS Max before bringing them into Unreal Engine.
- For the materials I made a shader with macro texture variation, and bump offset with a height map to make the stones look 3 dimensional. There is also a normal map and an ambient occlusion map for better contrast.