Medieval World

Creating a Medieval Fortified Castel in UE5

Looking for ideas

I started researching the pillars of the project and how to approach it, beginning with looking for references to identify the most appealing ones to follow. To better organize my thoughts, I used Pureref, which allows you to have a lot of organization. Gradually, I began to plan out what I could do.

BlockOut Organization

Starting with UE5, the first thing was the creation of a blockout to organise the map and recognise what elements it would or could need.

In the blockout, I used simple geometry to give me the general idea, and little by little I could change those elements for the well defined models.

Landscape Creation

To create the landscape I started sculpting in UE5 itself with the landscape tool, but the result is not correct. So after looking for several options, I saw that the best was to generate the map by a Heightmap image, that allows you to have much more detail of the map, to do it I helped myself with the World Machine program and later making retouches in Photoshop.

Landscape Texture

While working on this step, I thought it would be easy to do a proper texturing of the landscape. However, when I created the MasterMaterial I encountered several challenges. It is difficult to create an AutoMaterial that is applied to the landscape texturing correctly. Finally by searching for tutorials, failing several times and experimenting I achieved a realistic result.
When I got the result I wanted, I also created an additional material to be able to paint a dirt road on the geometry.

Something very important is also the textures used for texturing!

Project Results

Here are some images of how the finished Landscape looks like. It is filled with vegetation, with some trees, stones, bushes and grass.

The lake is made with the WaterMaterial offered by UE5.

And the castle, formed by a big base, big towers, decorated with architecture, props, particles and mesh decals.

My Personal Journey

I have really enjoyed creating this project as I have learnt a lot of things from different areas, I have had to face several problems that have made me gain a lot of experience and fluency in my work.

I hope you like it. see you soon!