Creating a medieval street scene in Blender / UE5

Software: Blender 4.0 / UE5
Final result: www.artstation.com/artwork/5v...
Info:
An overview of creating a medieval environment reconstruction in Blender 4.0. It is explained in six parts how this was achieved. A version for Unreal Engine 5 has also been made.
Textures: polyhaven.com
Addons: polyhaven.com/plugins/blender
Follow me:
Artstation: www.artstation.com/tuytel
X: / blenderpedia
Music: / cirrus-cc-by

[@jimmydesilva]

As someone who lives in a city that looks like this, and having played games since the 80s, I must say it's incredible how close to realism you've come here!

[@KIVED]

Can you please tell me how you baked everything in blender to make it work in Unreal Engine, maybe make a short tutorial on it?

[@Rem_NL]

7:20 Rembrandt smiled when he saw this :) Stunning work

[@MicroDobb]

Thank you, Rob! It was very intersting lection! Awesome result! Happy New Year!

[@gabrielf.martinezvalois4023]

Great project and workflow! Congratulations!

[@Hashirama_Sinju]

When it comes to creating environments in Blender, you are the best. Lovely scene ❤

[@RobTuytel]

haha, thanks !

[@konraddobson]

This is just fantastic! Well done.

[@brandonjacksoon]

Awesome! Beautiful!

[@CGObaid]

As always, 🤩Incredibly awesome Environment and amazing video, my friend! ❤Loved it, You're my hero! The fact that you made all the buildings instead of just duplicating a few of them is crazy. The final scene in Unreal engine looks sick, I better try out Unreal Engine :D

[@RobTuytel]

It was a long longggg ride :) thanks!

[@CGObaid]

@@RobTuytel You're welcome!

[@lenstobrush7266]

This work and attention to detail is sublime. Could you please do a more detailed video/tutorial on how you achieved the level displacement whilst still controlling your poly count. Maybe do a separate detailed video on how you created the building 4:30 in

[@RobTuytel]

Yeah, i think i will work on that next week

[@CGElementary]

Beautiful work!

[@LoLMasta07]

this is beautiful

[@D12_Diederik]

this is such great work. Thanks for sharing!

[@RobTuytel]

thanks!

[@brandonjacksoon]

Welcome back, Master!

[@max_nadolny]

Looks amazing!

[@lordsponge10]

Looks like the canal in Delft, the Netherlands

[@CGObaid]

That's exactly it! He lives there :D

[@RobTuytel]

yes! but this is the city of enkhuizen called 'het zuiderspui'@@CGObaid

[@CGObaid]

@@RobTuytel oh, nice

[@ushirogeri8085]

You're great! The weather effects are amazing. I would love to buy a tutorial with such weather effects ;)

[@P4TCH5S]

so high level! amazing!

[@sodoffuson]

I think I'm right in thinking you've made the glass of each whole window with a single face, but in old windows, each pane is not mounted perfectly parallel to the others. If I were you I'd make one plane-island per pane and then use a GN/shader setup to randomly slightly perturb the normals on a per-island or per-face basis. Windows will also tend to bulge slightly. The glass surface also won't be perfectly flat - it will have ripples, imperfections and inclusions of sand grains and bubbles in it as well as be a variety of blue-green to clear colours - but this is less significant to the look at a distance than the pane angles.

[@nichtrelevant6240]

absolutely right! ...or just not using glass windows so frequently since it's a medieval scene :P check my post for some more nerdy talk about it if you're interested ^^

[@RobTuytel]

The windows need more care, but they all have single glass frames. You can see this in one of my other scenes in the viewport render cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/069/718/657/large/rob-tuytel-fet6h-awqam5wgt.jpg?1700819217 I agree on the ripples effect, i think i will give this a try in my next design !

[@wolpumba4099]

*Summary* *Introduction to the Project* - 0:00 Introduction to the tutorial on creating a medieval street scene in Blender and exporting it to Unreal Engine 5. - 0:15 Total production time of around 70 days, including work on buildings, street environment, props, and real-time editing. - 0:38 Use of Poly Haven assets, a free platform for models, textures, and skies, and its plugin for Blender. *Research and Planning* - 1:10 Emphasis on the importance of research. - 1:19 Creation of a Trello page to collect sketches, photographs, paintings, and old maps for reference. *Scene Blockout* - 1:35 Process of making a scene blockout. - 1:41 Use of photos and Reality Capture for 3D reconstruction. - 1:54 Importing and aligning a plane to the 3D scan. - 2:10 Sculpting the terrain and blocking out 11 buildings. - 2:53 Choosing colors and compositions for the scene. - 3:00 Removal of the photo scan reveals all buildings in the scene. *Constructing the Buildings* - 3:13 Beginning the construction of buildings. - 3:19 Using simple cubes, cutting holes, and adding ornaments. - 3:37 Incorporation of photo scans for realistic touches. - 4:24 Complexity in building shaders, including different types of textures and displacement maps. *Constructing the Base* - 5:15 Starting with blending two cobblestone textures. - 5:25 Finding and scanning a real-life bow bridge. - 5:37 Incorporating main structures into the scene. - 5:55 Adjusting environment lighting and updating the base layer with extra textures. *Rendering the Scene* - 6:16 Addressing empty background areas by adding new buildings. - 6:50 Incorporating photo-scanned side steps and Sandstone border stones. - 7:12 Adding characters and animals for the final render. *Exporting to Unreal Engine 5* - 7:28 Exporting the scene to Unreal Engine 5. - 7:35 Baking out all textures due to complex shaders. - 7:52 Aligning buildings in Unreal Engine. - 8:11 Use of Unreal Engine 5's high-resolution mesh import capability. - 8:25 Addition of weather effects, with a preference for snow. Disclaimer: I used chatgpt4 to summarize the video transcript. This method may make mistakes in recognizing words.

[@RobTuytel]

I feel old, but this is gold !

[@tonystep3d]

Awesome! Thanks for inspiration!!! Keep it!

[@vizdotlife]

Beautiful work! ❤

[@RobTuytel]

thanks!

[@Rockhopper1]

that is beautiful thank you for sharing

[@dicktempelaar]

Geweldig Rob, ik ben 66 jaar en sinds kort jouw cursus op Udemy Creating 3d environments aangeschaft, ik heb nog een lange weg te gaan hahahah

[@normalgoat6419]

The final result is so incredible! You are a true artist/master/magician/virtuoso! I bought your course and I learnt a lot, even though I use 3ds Max. Definitely worth it. It would be great if you would also do an in-depth course on this whole process in this video. I would buy it instantly. For example, I don't understand how the photoscan stuff works. I also wonder how you got the displacement to work so well in UE, because when I import my buildings with displacement, it looks weird, even though I enabled all the nanite tessellation stuff. Also wonder about small things like how you texture the material of the window frames and stuff like that and where you get the sandstone textures (do you make them yourself?), same for the different objects like shutters/wooden beams, etc. and how you make the buildings slightly crooked, etc. I would love to see a course on this type of stuff. Ik ben zelf ook een Nederlandertje overigens (hihi).

[@sinamohamadi65]

Just i can say that it's Amazing 🤩

[@cg_arch]

Wow, this is an amazing result, in the final render with snow a thing the leaf on the tree should be hidden, everything else looks perfect :)

[@RobTuytel]

Yes, was out of time to get everything right, but i agree

[@user-qv4eq8td6j]

amazing work 🔥🔥🔥🔥💯💯💯💯

[@EvilNando]

nicely done thank you for the video

[@CreativeSteve69]

This scene looks amazing as always Rob. I loved learning blender from ya over at udemy. I hope you had a good holiday and have a great new years. any word on a new udemy tutorial on the horizon this year by any chance? I have a itch to get back into blender learning again. :)

[@matizz8]

This is brutal Rob! Amazing!! This would be epic to get an extended tutorial, I realize this takes tremendous effort and time to do this...but anyway, are you planning to spoil us with any new lenghty tutorials?

[@RobTuytel]

First new course will be May this year for Blender 4.1 focusing on the new eevee realtime engine.

[@CGObaid]

@@RobTuytel I was thinking, it would be really awesome if you made a beginner friendly course on making and capturing your own textures and assets. Like how do you make capture PBR maps of a plant?

[@Cyb11893]

Cool

[@vladankudinov992]

Are we going to have new course on Udemy!? This looks amazing! And the part with capturing real scene is very interesting. I don't remember "creating environments" course to have it. Also Rob, have your ever tried to exactly reconstruct some part of survived medieval city? This is probably not that fun, but this is interesting exercise, and I would love to compare apples to apples photo and render, just to know the SOTA limits

[@RobTuytel]

Making reconstructions takes a lot of time, this scene took 70 days to get it done. It was part of a study project, otherwise way to expensive to produce

[@TripTilt]

very cool realism and a lot to learn from the short video :) I know how to copy paste and distor together those arches from bricks, but how do you copy the color and the normal information at the same time in photoshop?

[@RobTuytel]

Using recording actions

[@TripTilt]

@@RobTuytel those do stack up after a while... since you move to a different place and distort differently every time. or can you reuse actions for that?

[@billisenberger7112]

It would be great if you could do a course on photo scanning.

[@manuel.camelo]

CRAZY AMAZING !!! 👁️👃👁️🙏

[@nichtrelevant6240]

visually nice scene! but this is everything but medieval ^^ dont know if medieval is just a selling tag and you are aware, but looks like 17th-18th century dutch city in a craftsmen area to me. :P The rest is for nerds who are interested in a little medieval arch.-crack-wise: Worth noting: medieval buildings have not been built jaggy and shifted, they became like this thoughout the centurys by parts of the building sagging through bad building ground. other thing i noticed in many other scenes wich got the "medieval-european" tag: windows were smaller. those huge, tiled shop windows you see here to the left were not common at all, especially not in squared tiles, but more like in a rhombus-tiled shape wich was more common and quite small glass fragments. Some freakinly rich guilds/traders/mayors had those in early 15th century like in Lübeck/Germany (and other german "Hanse", or Dutch trading citys) for example, but they had it to show off their wealth, since glass was still extremely expensive and before that pretty much only used for churches. Profane buildings used wooden shutters, pelts, thin leather, or oiled pergament (ye, fire was quite an issue back then..). While looking at "medieval" buildings still standing today you have to keep in mind: those Buildings are 1500-500 years old and have been renovated and adjusted to the times "modern style" and liking thoughout history. so probably 90% of the medieval buildings today, that are still standing, have an at least 18th century facade (+ alot of the sketched stuff is modern (18th cen.) too, showing the times it was sketched current state of the facades). That's a common missunderstanding caused just by picking the "wrong" reference, or just a general lack of actual real medieval footage. The good thing with understanding that is: buildings evolved over time and most of the times you can "read" a certain history of building phases and changes in typology in those old facades, wich can be, if you keep that in mind, a great tool to add more detail and make your medieval artwork believeable and emersive, by showing the different building stages and how old stuff was built on older stuff, wich was built on... you get what i mean. environmental (hi-)storytelling..

[@RobTuytel]

I like this comment! I use the word medieval to reach the audience who enjoys recreating old buildings. If I use Dutch Renaissance, I'm certain that no one will be attracted to it, as much as I regret that. Medieval has evolved into a specific genre where everything before 1800 falls under in this '3d scene'. I don't agree with that either, but what can I do about it? In my course, I definitely mention this, but for the general public, I don't need to try. By the way, what do you think of the type of houses drawn by Auguste Böhm, doesn't this also fall under medieval? Personally, I find these to be the most beautiful types of houses, this work is more reminiscent of that: www.artstation.com/artwork/yDevAK

[@nichtrelevant6240]

Auguste Böhm the Belgian romantic artist? Don't really know his work and it's very little shown online, so i cant really tell ^^ but as the most romantic painters i assume him to be drawing scenes of idealised landscapes/life at the countryside, or more like how people in the 19th century were imagining the world before industrialisation. so some how medievalish i guess of what their ideal was. if you have a suggestion for a favorite painting/house of yours that i could look up, i'd be interested! And yes, i was already arguing that you might have just tagged it as medieval for a better range, nothing wrong with it :P My favorite houses, when it comes to medieval stuff, are most likely more like functional buildings then those for living. check out the "Krantor" (the german name tho, just meaning "Cranegate") in Danzig/Poland for example. Quite impressive and in it's current form from around 1450. Took it as reference for a harbor project lately@@RobTuytel

[@szebasztianboszormenyi1448]

Hi! Firstly, it was a very nice and detailed job, congrat for that! 😊 Next to it Iwould like to ask about the snowy version of the scene. The snow on the buildings and street were handled by the Ultra dynamic sky, or you made this in shader with a snow material?

[@RobTuytel]

Yes, i used UDS for the snow effect

[@IceMediaApS]

Amazing. Well done👍

[@pepi9429]

Now that's a beautiful 17th century street view! But yeah, "medieval" gets more views 😅I'm a big fan of your work btw.

[@RobTuytel]

Yeah, medieval is the genre, but 17th century dutch architecture it is

[@dineshfilms566]

You are genius-pls say this how we learn those shader nodes just say answer please

[@dontneedfriends376]

21 million faces?!! Nahh my pc gonna be a toaster🥲

[@RobTuytel]

yups, my PC was toasted as well.

[@GustavsNikitins]

70 days? omg

[@raymonlarsen6019]

I am just wondering how you did the road? Did you separate the parts or did you seperate everything by vertex paint? I am struggling😅

[@RobTuytel]

I used texture overlays to archieve this effect

[@shortlifefacts1638]

Fantastic, thanks. Look forward to the new course in may @@RobTuytel

[@3dlab334]

Hi, guys! I'm currently taking the "Creating 3D Environments in Blender" course on Udemy, and it's awesome. I read below that there's a new course coming up in May. Will UE5 be included?

[@reedfish99]

Awesome work! A sub from me!

[@Lox11111]

Will there be a course on Blender 4.0/UE5?

[@RobTuytel]

Yes, that's definitely coming. Blender has been growing very rapidly in recent years, I always try to keep two years between launching a course, but the versions are now coming out very quickly. I expect to have the major update for 4.2 finished by the end of this year and in May this year a nice course for the new Eevee real-time engine.

[@benveasey7474]

You said 'manually align in UE'. Could you have exported out of B3D as a USD scene then imported this into UE as a single scene?

[@RobTuytel]

I am not yet familiar with USD, I also do not recommend my current workflow, it was purely to see how this is expressed in UE5.

[@Play-to-earnn]

Hi man this is nice work I love it plaese can you send me sound background ❤

[@vanhansel100]

Where did you get those characters and animals? Can you tell me?

[@RobTuytel]

These are part of my 3D environment course on the Blendermarket

[@vanhansel100]

@@RobTuytel okay, thank you!

[@LexGear]

I'm going to be "that guy" and say that this is not "medieval". This is far from it. The middle ages span roughly 1000 years ending in 1450.

[@RobTuytel]

Well, i agree !

[@shush4]

Nobody asked

[@artisans8521]

It's in fact 17th century. But that is knitpicking. It's pretty convincing work.

[@foshizzlfizzl]

​@@shush4at least you weren't asked of anything

[@shush4]

@@foshizzlfizzl shush m8

[@dicktempelaar]

@dicktempelaar Great Rob, I am 66 years old and recently purchased your course on Udemy Creating 3d environments, I still have a long way to go hahahahah

[@matioz9125]

Liop badiop mudoli

[@ritunjaykothari6602]

Hi