Obsidian Artists Recreate Mos Eisley in Unreal Engine 4
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The folks at Obsidian must clearly be proud of their colleagues' work, because the official Twitter account for the company alerted us to this article on Level 80 penned by senior environment artist Jason Lewis, who explained and showcased the work he and 16 colleagues put together. It's a recreation of Mos Eisley, the spaceport first shown Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, in the Unreal Engine 4, which started because of the developers' desire to learn how to work in the engine.
The article includes plenty of screenshots and a few now unfortunately dead links to download the thing, but it's also a pretty extensive look into the work that went into it. A snippet:
Hello there, my name is Jason Lewis and I guess you could call me the lead of this group project. I am a Senior Environment artist working for Obsidian Entertainment. In addition to myself, the other artists working with me on this project all currently work for Obsidian as well, from additional senior artists, to mid-range and junior artists as well. We even have someone on the QA team contributing some artwork as well. In total there are 17 people contributing to this project in varying capacities. This is a just-for-fun personal project that we are all contributing to for no reason other than we are all a bunch of super Star Wars fans and with all the Star Wars awesomeness going on these days, we all thought it would be a good time to jump in and produce a quality fan art project. In addition to just being a bunch of super Star Wars nerds, several of us have been wanting an excuse to learn Unreal 4 for some time now, so we figured that this was a perfect opportunity.
I myself have been working in the games industry for over 21 years, with a broad range of studios, from small start-ups early in my career, to some of the larger publishers/developers such as Sony and EA. I have contributed to many games over the years, some of the more notable titles are Enter the Matrix, and The Matrix Path of Neo [Shiny Entertainment], SOCOM 4 [Zipper Interactive& Sony Computer Entertainment], Medal of Honor Warfighter and a brief stint on Battlefield 4 DLC [EA], and Armored Warfare [Obsidian Entertainment]. I also took a brief hiatus from making games back in 1999 & 2000 to work on the Starship Troopers Animated television series. As I mentioned previously, in addition to myself we have several other artists, most with over 10 years of experience, working with me. A few of note are Terry Hess, another senior artist who has worked on several Call of Duty titles and also worked for EA on Medal of Honor and Battlefield 4. Craig Marschke, another senior artist from the Call of Duty realm and the fondly remembered Novalogic era. Ken LeSaint & Thad Clevenger, two more senior artists from various industry backgrounds. Brian Leleux, one of Obsidian’s primary lighting artists, and several others.
Lewis also has a few videos on his own YouTube channel showcasing the project. I'm going to embed one below:
Note that this project is a fan art project and should not be construed as a sign that Obsidian is currently working on a Star Wars game or even attempting to pitch one. While the higher-ups at the company have always been upfront about wanting to work on the Star Wars IP again, Electronic Arts seems to be currently the only developer working on multiplatform AAA titles in the franchise thanks to their deal with Disney, and an Obsidian-developed Star Wars project seems pretty unlikely, especially with their current team structure leaving very few developers free.
All that said, based on this fan art, I have no doubt working on another Star Wars game would be a passion project for many of the developers at the Californian studio.
