[WIP] The Highway of Tomorrow - Unreal 5

wenglish

I'm trying to get a better handle on making environments in Unreal, so I decided to take a piece of concept art and try to make an environment based on it. Not necessarily going for 1 to 1 exact recreation but trying to build it in such a way that its true to the concept. I decided to use "The Highway of Tomorrow" by Syd Mead. Here's my reference:

And here's my current progress in Unreal:

I made the buildings myself in Maya and Substance Painter and used Megascans and some marketplace assets for natural elements.

Here are the elements I made custom:

And here's a gif of the progress so far

wenglish

A year later, and why not revisit this? I never liked that the roads were just sort of placed in the view and didn't really connect. So I decided to rework everything and see if I could make this a proper open world map with actually connecting roads. It's not easy at all... but here's an attempt.

Any feedback on how to build roads properly would be very much appreciated. Seems to be an under discussed topic

Toureiro

Looking good!

Are the roads supposed to be made of dirt? In the concept I read them less as dirt paths and more as some future, limestone pavement. Some fancy ideal local material that is also used in the big tower on the right. At the least the dirt road texture seems too large.

I really like the long building on the side of the road!

wenglish

@Toureiro thank you for the feedback! You are certainly correct, I don't know what was making me think the road was dirt. I changed up the UV tiling like you suggested and that helped a lot, but I still need to do another big texturing pass. I think the big white tower needs adjusting, I want it to shine more without looking "untextured". I also think the long building (which I imagine is more of a highway embankment) looks too grungy and should be a bit more metallic. 

For now I've been focusing on trying to nail down some camera stuff and making tweaks to the lighting and shot layouts. Also added some megastructures in the distance. I imagine they are for gathering some kind of natural resource which the white tower converts to electricity for the city