RadCity: UE5 mid-poly assets
interpolator
Hello friends. After a short break I'm working on a new solo project, one I want to wrap up by end of year.
A top-down, post-apocalyptic exploration game, a little bit of Fallout 1 + Stalker, without combat. Just exploration and scavenging for food.
I'm using UE5 with nanite and 99% of assets are made in a mid-poly workflow, that is - no bakes and just chamfers and geo detail as needed. Probably made creation time 1/3 of what it was with baking, and honestly after so many years of baking I love this workflow. Brings back a little bit of the joy of creation. I can be done in a few hours with geo and uvs then go immediately to texturing.
Anyway here are some screenshots.
Assets are made for top-down views, but also may work for thirdperson games (everything is 256px/m). Most buildings and locations are real locations I photographed here in Romania.
and here are some closeups:
Let me know if you have any cool ideas for this project!
Replies
This looks really, really good! It reminds me of Half-Life 2.
You’ve truly excelled in the amount of detail here, and it’s honestly hard to come up with suggestions.
One small thing I noticed, mainly in the darker scenes, is that the player could perhaps be highlighted just a little more, or given a subtle light source so they stand out slightly from the environment.
In two shots (the blue one and the very dark one with the light in the corner), it’s a bit difficult to clearly see the player at first glance.
The player blends in extremely well with the environment, maybe just a bit too well in those cases.
@TorQue[MoD] i think mid poly hard surface is a great use for nanite. Of course if it's too low poly, like huge parts with a few tris, the nanite culling will suffer, but there's sufficient geo here that it works well. Just because it works with a million polys theres no need to use all that. Not to mention perfect auto lods and NO MORE baking, it's like the future 😆
Also, I disagree about the character needing to pop more. If this is a game, you're not going to need to worry about it. It doesn't matter if they blend in in screenshots. Adding a faint light around the character would ruin the look, and the red hoodie makes the character pop enough if you're not colorblind.
Even if baking low poly meshes and not using nanite saves 4-10 fps it's not feasible to do that as a solo person (plus lods are not needed at all because of the fixed camera distance)
The demo is already done and on steam, it will be part of next fest this february. Performance is fine in my book, the whole project is being developed on a 4060 laptop and its my go to benchmark 🤘
My only nitpick would be that some of the grass currently looks floaty and could integrate better with the world. Perhaps something like blending in a different texture at the ground could help with that. But also placement.
Gameplay wise, I could imagine tracking some person or a group and piecing together what happened to them based on what they left behind. There could be even another faction tracking them too, perhaps by means of robots/ drones that need to be tricked or avoided. Perhaps it's not even clear to the player why the character is tracking their target (rescue them, take revenge, learn or recover something).
Another element could be some sort of overgrowth that changes the world, possibly adding obstacles/ environmental hazards to overcome. Could be either some plants or fungi or something not from this world. Could give some contrast to the urban environment. I remember seing some beautiful overgrowth in HL Alyx.
Yet another element I remember from HL2 were those more abstract, metallic Combine structures which broke up the city. It provided some cool visual contrast and was sometimes used to set borders to the play space. In Alyx I remember such structures being used as blockers/ puzzles.
Possibly all things you already thought of