Nekheb Dig - Desert Temple

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Project Overview

After a few years of uni work mainly consisting of Sci-fi work by myself, I decided to work on a more natural setting for a piece of 3D modelling work. I wanted a place which would be secluded from the rest of the world, allowing a focus on one scene. One area that has always fascinated me was Egyptian temples. So I set out to produce an Egyptian-like temple in a desert setting.

Work Flow

I started my project by planning a basic outline of a temple layout, allowing me to figure out what modular pieces to create in order to produce a layout I wanted. I then built a basic whitebox of the layout in Maya and put it into UE4, allowing me to wander around the map and see if the dimensions worked well. Such as the courtyard and end chamber area.

Below: Early whitebox and that whitebox put into UE4.

I quickly found out that the courtyard was too small for what I had envisioned. I also found the fact you could go straight in a line through the entire temple to be boring. Not to mention the entire temple was at one level at this point in production.

Below: The 'Beta' whitebox and how it looked in UE4.

The layout was vastly improved, not only in terms of layout but the feel of the map was improved by the temple not being at one level and the added interior corners made it feel more akin to actual Egyptian temple examples.

Below: You can see the changes from the initial layout to the final layout in more depth.

Designing the modular pieces.

Firstly, I decided early on to have less unique assets as possible to see how much of a scene could be produced using modular pieces. Both lowering production time and saving space on the build. I found that in the white box I could create the layout I wanted with only using a few various pieces for the walls.

In the end these were the pieces produced:

1x 1mX4m Wall

3x 2mX4m Wall

1x 1m Curved Wall

1x 0.5m Curved Wall

1x Sarcophagous

1x Fountain

1x Broken Wall Piece

1x Rock

1x Bowl

1x Pillar

1x Broken Pillar

1x 1mX4m Door

1x Vase

1x Brazier

1x Stargate (Totally not a stargate for legal reasons)

1x Navigation Pole

1x Pyramid

1x Wooden Crate

Above: The entire scene was produced from these pieces & pyramid to left of pic.

Creating the Sandscape.

Due to never having produced a landscape in UE4 I had to look up the various aspects, such as the UE4 landscaping tool and how to indeed even texture the landscape afterwards.

Firstly I looked into how to create the dunes I wanted, with various tutorials found on Epics website and YouTube. I started out by crafting a basic dune landscape around my whitebox in UE4.

Then I moved onto looking into landscape texturing. Utilising textures sourced from Textures.com I used a few different sand textures to create different dune styles and even found one that almost gives the illusion that sand had been walked upon.

Above: I also added a shimmer effect using the engines focus effect tool.

Moving on I wanted to have a rolling sandstorm effect around the map and whilst I did have something working it was not up to my standards of work and thus was cancelled. My main problem being I could not get the particle effects to follow the dunes I had created and they would dissipate on other dunes, due to destroy on collision effects.

Project Reflection

The project altogether was a success in terms of learning new techniques and producing work that would stand out on my portfolio that was unlike previous work.

I firmly believe I have demonstrated the ability to work on areas that are not rooted in sci-fi. Furthermore I found myself becoming more adept at substance painter through the module, using the program on an almost daily basis. Which has vastly helped my work on other projects since.

However, there would be many things I would change if I revisited this project at a later date. Such as texture streaming on the landscape and maybe having dunes in the far distance being 2D objects instead of landscape. Maybe even looking deeper into post-fx and particle effects to enhance the scene such as rolling sand and more.