Banjo Kazooie's Spiral Mountain - Unreal Engine 4 recreation

RobertRitchie

So I've been lovingly working on this for around 3-4 months now for a University assignment on the Masters Game Design course at Sheffield Hallam University. We were tasked to re-imagine an area of an older game using modern techniques, such as PBR.

I'm a huge Rare and Banjo-Kazooie fan so it only seemed natural to me to re-create the iconic opening area from the first N64 game! It was definitely a personal project too, as a love letter to Rare themselves.

Enjoy!

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl8uOcgD0CY

Process images:

Meloncov

Your textures and lighting are really working against you. The original has bold colors and big defined shapes in the textures. Your textures are muted and noisy, with a lot of small details but not many big features that read from a distance. You need to either add more large texture features, or, probably better, model in some of the variations in the cliff face that are textures in the original.

With the lighting, the contrast is too high and the shadows too sharp to capture the feel you're going for. Also, bring out the green light from the eyes more; in the original, they illuminate that whole cliff face.

You should take a careful look at Disney's last couple films to get a better sense of how to combine a traditional cartoony aesthetic with physically based materials.

RobertRitchie

Thank you! I'll definitely take this advice into account in the future

3dReaper

First impression, this looks great. However then I can see some areas that need work.

Adding on top of what Meloncov has said, you need to reword Grunty's entrance. The N64 game has her face as a separate asset placed into the cliff wall. Model out that detail, add her bulging eyes, and try to capture her  face a bit more. Add the red mouth lighting as well.

You can push this a bit further by adding mole hills where they appeared in the game, honey boxes, and perhaps a blue back pack propped against something. Add a jiggy? Perhaps rework the skydome texture as well, make it a bit more cartoony themed.

These games exuded character with an insanely low amount of technical power. Fix the areas mentioned above, make this warmer, cheery, fun, and inviting.