Fan Creates Realistic View of the Barrens in Unreal Engine - Community Spotlight

Live Posted 2022/09/13 at 8:00 AM by Paryah

I've always wanted to make a realistic reinterpretation of World of Warcraft and decided to choose the good old Barrens as my location. I have lots of fond memories and countless hours spent exploring and leveling in that zone, and overall I think it's one of the most iconic places in the game.

I had lots of goals (both technical and artistic) with this artwork, but primarily it was to improve my compositional, lighting and storytelling skills plus see my own original concept/idea through to the end.

I went through quite a lot of iteration with the composition as you can see in the GIF breakdown process below, mostly in trying to strike a good balance between the opposing alliance sword and the horde tower, whilst incorporating the surrounding story elements without things getting too cluttered.

The scene is rendered in Unreal 4.26.2 using the Movie Render Queue feature and I used World Machine to generate a heightmap for the landscape. The road was made using the neat Unreal Landscape spline tool with plenty of temporal dithering + rock & sand terrain layer painting to blend it in with the landscape itself. For the fog, I utilised exponential fog as well as additional hand-placed fog cards with a panning texture for the moving dust. The organic assets and materials in the scene such as rocks, foliage and cliffs are mostly comprised of Quixel Megascans assets.

Comment by DMaestroVery cool!Comment by FlotibVery nice! ggComment by rossyysBlizzard, hire this man!Comment by cawakerThis is great and inspiring, I’ve been trying to learn Unreal Engine, and it’s not easy.Comment by PlayDohBoyIn the words of Peter Griffin..."Why are we not supporting this?"Comment by CalphrichamFantastic art! It's fascinating what people can create on Unreal Engine.Comment by davemacawesomeHuh, it looks pretty good and if Blizzard ever decides to do a massive overhaul of literally everything, they should hire youComment by UDtheAesirVery good!Comment by onefishbluefishIt would take like 2000 artists to redo Azeroth like this .Comment by SylverbladeAlways the random people "Blizzard hire this man!" whenever something 'good' or 'impressive' is shown.
But this doesn't fit the cartoony Warcraft style in my opinion.Comment by onefishbluefishAlways the random people "Blizzard hire this man!" whenever something 'good' or 'impressive' is shown.
But this doesn't fit the cartoony Warcraft style in my opinion.Comment by rossyysAlways the random people "Blizzard hire this man!" whenever something 'good' or 'impressive' is shown.
But this doesn't fit the cartoony Warcraft style in my opinion.Comment by Sandlinginsane wow 2Comment by ItacolomiAlways the random people "Blizzard hire this man!" whenever something 'good' or 'impressive' is shown.
But this doesn't fit the cartoony Warcraft style in my opinion.Comment by HeatherWindI am so amazed and impressed by this. Beautiful work!Comment by KerathrasThis is amazing!

Admittedly I don’t understand the next thing about all the technical stuff that goes into making a game look like that but if any studio has the resources to do it it’s Blizzard and the fact that they haven’t really ticks me off.Comment by XingbgIn the words of Peter Griffin..."Why are we not supporting this?"Comment by mybelovedchaosThis is beautiful! Great work here Justin!Comment by kkkorhetzPoor Alliance flag! Was on the picture on a few locations, didn't survived until the last edit :'(Comment by erehwonlostWhy not post a link to Justin's work to get more people excited about this artist?