Build a Medieval Church Ruin

COURSE TRAILER:

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

If you’re a 3D artist who’s driven to grow and master high-poly asset creation, this series is for you! In part 1 of the series using Houdini and Unreal Engine 5 we build a medieval church ruin asset kit from scratch consisting of over 200 million polygons.

This course consists of 8 chapters with over 90 hours of video content. Each recording is in real-time giving you the option to follow along step by step if you choose.. 
Note: All videos have been edited to remove as much “chaff” as possible. This includes saving, processing, and import times to name a few.

SOFTWARE USED:

• Maya 2023 - Used to view the level design geometry and create our block mesh. Note: if you’re not comfortable with or don’t have access to Maya feel free to use your own modelling package as most techniques used are universal.
• Affinity Photo 2 - Used to create the grid texture however almost any photo editing program will do.
• Houdini 19.5 (Indie Edition) - Used to create the asset kit for this course. Note: Used SideFX labs 19.5
• Unreal Engine 5 - This course was started in 5.0 and completed in 5.3.2.
• Substance Designer - Used to create the texture sets for our asset kit.

CHAPTER DESCRIPTIONS:

Chapter 1: Prepping
In chapter 1 we build our developer grid texture and materials in Maya and Unreal Engine 5. We briefly discuss vertex colours and their use in asset creation.
Chapter 2: Block mesh
In chapter 2 we dismantle the provided level design geometry and build rough representations of our asset kit as well as identify what assets need to be built.
Chapter 3: Rough mesh
In chapter 3 we dive into Houdini and start building our assets. Since we’re building tiling geometry we create tools to speed up this process whilst giving us maximum freedom to be creative AND consistent. These tools include a Wall Builder, Brick Cutter, Brick Offset, and Geometry Exporter.
Chapter 4: Destruction
In chapter 4 we take the time to art direct destruction by carving out holes and breaking asset pieces to represent the final kit geometry.
Chapter 5: Destroy RBD
Once we’re happy with the macro shapes, in chapter 5 we use Houdini’s Rigid Body Dynamics (RBD) to smash objects into our assets, giving them an organic and worn feel.
Chapter 6: Surface Damage and UVing
In chapter 6 our kit geometry takes on it’s final look. We create tools to procedurally add surface and edge damage to our assets and further explore vertex colours and how to use them in our texturing pipeline. We also build a procedural UVing tool!
Chapter 7: Texturing
In chapter 7 we use Substance Designer to create rock, dirt, and lichen texture sets. We discuss texel density and how taking the time to standardize it can reduce material complexity before building our materials in Unreal Engine 5.
Chapter 8: Props
And finally in Chapter 8 we finish up and bring the whole project together by creating our handrail, rock, and ruin chunk prop assets.

SKILL LEVEL:

This is an intermediate to advanced course. Students are expected to be familiar with Houdini, Unreal Engine 5, Maya, and Substance Designer. The whole tutorial process is step-by-step so if you’re a determined beginner to intermediate user you could probably follow along… maybe…(?)

CHAPTER VIDEO FILES:

All videos have been recorded in 2560x1440 at 60 frames per second. Each chapter has been split up into multiple zipped parts and organised into a logical folder structure with easy to understand naming.

SOURCE FILES:

What IS included:

• Maya Scene files - I’ve edited the acii scene files which should work with Maya 2020 and above.
• Unreal Engine 5 Base Project - The starting Unreal Engine 5 project.
• Houdini .hip file - The asset construction file.
• Houdini .hda files - I’ve included the .hda files created in this course.

What IS NOT included: 

• Medieval Ruin Asset kit - The Asset kit and working geometry are all just too big.
• Houdini working files - In order to make the Houdini assets we had to export .bgeo files during the process. All of these working files add up to 61 gigabytes. As this is the case I’ve not included them.

*Digital products are non-refundable