Using drones and various techniques, mobile developer David Finsterwalder constructed an awesome virtual version of the German castle Hohenrechberg in Unreal Engine 4.
It was designed to be a virtual sightseeing experience using VR headsets. But looking at the size of it, something like this would be the perfect map for medieval death matches.
Here’s an impressive video below and brief summary of all the challenges the creator of this project faced:
Working with Photogrammetry for realtime stuff is tedious work, especially with the limitation of a mobile device (even with unlit models). The short time is also a factor (I signed up 1 day before milestone 1 doing everything from scratch (Photos, cleaning, remeshing). Also my equipment is limited (consumer grade camera, UAV and PC) and i realized that i lack a good ultra wide angle (fisheye) lens for narrow areas and couldn’t compensate by simply taking more pictures, because i lack RAM and the time needed for the computations. Working around these limitations is not an easy task and to reconstruct a complete castle takes more time. So for the VRjam submission the visit-able areas of the castle will be limited. Also upgrading to android 5 in midst of the contest was challenging and i had to adopt to the lower performance by reworking assets.
Here’s a link for the test version, you can try it out on Android devices.
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