Neo Oblivion

I’ve been a fan of the Elder Scrolls games for years, starting with Oblivion. It’s going to be a long wait for Elder Scrolls VI, so creating a modern take on the Ayleid ruins in Oblivion felt like a way to get my Elder Scrolls fix. This Scene was Created as my capstone project during the Vertex School Bootcamp.

I wanted to create a scene that was very honest to the original, and I was inspired by Wiktor Öhman’s Counter-Strike project where he used photogrammetry to exactly recreate the game map. Using the in game ruin Varondo, I took a large number of screenshots. Those images were then fed into Reality Capture to create the base mesh for creating the map geometry.

I took the base mesh into Houdini and using VDB conversions and surface noise, added procedural edge wear to the mesh. Using a combination of booleans, cutter geometry, and edge wear I created the worn blocks. With this setup, I could generate the ruin geometry by copying the node setup to each part.

The high poly geometry was converted inside of Houdini to a low poly model with generated uv’s as well. The high and low were baked together in Marmoset.

For Texturing I used Megascans Assets that were layered together to create the look of ancient marble. I also used Megascans atlas textures for building the trees in Speedtree, and Megascans assets for the rock and grass set dressing.