Unreal Engine 5is the latest and most advanced engine from Epic Games. Revealed in 2020 and officially launched in April, it’s designed to let developers createhighly detailed and photorealistic environmentswithout the massive investment in time, money, and labor.
Various hobbyists have taken advantage of this by usingUnreal Engine 5to create unique digital environments based on real-life locations. One example is Reddit user walhargohar, who recently uploaded a video showing their digitization of the nearly 5,000-year-old ruins of Mohenjo-daro in modern-day Pakistan.
RELATED:Video Shows Portal Recreated in Unreal Engine
The video uploaded to Reddit opens with an aerial view of the location, followed by a clip of one of Unreal 5’s robotic avatars walking around the site’s central structure. The video then goes on to showcase the simulation’s real-time lighting before concluding with clips of the avatar examining the site’s Great Bath and looking over the city from the ruin’s highest point.
While it’s rough in some places and walhargohar hasn’t modeled any of the surrounding landscape, theimpressive Unreal Engine 5 environmentis fully explorable and appears to encompass most of the remaining structures. They also indicated that they intend to keep working on and improving their project and were open to the idea of making a “reconstructed” version based on how the city may have looked when it was still inhabited.
For anyone curious, Mohenjo-daro, meaning “Mound of the Dead Men,” are the ruins of a Bronze Age city built along the Indus River in Pakistan around 2,500 BC. Abandoned sometime around 1,900 BC, archeologists rediscovered the site in the early 20th century. Despite its relative obscurity, the site is noteworthy for its size, having an area of over 1.2 square miles and an estimated population of around 40,000 people.
Walhargohar captured the location using the Metashape software, which lets users create accurate 3D images based on photographs of real objects. Originally released in 2010, developers have used Metashape in games such asMetal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain,Halo 4,Cyberpunk 2077,The Talos Principle,Ryse: Son of Rome, and more. The software’s also used by various film and TV studios and is popular with archeologists. The latter may have been why walhargohar chose to use Metashape for this project.
Walhargohar isn’t the only digital artist doing impressive work in Unreal Engine 5. In May, an artist showed off their photorealistic recreation of the Etchu-Daimon train station in Imizu, Japan. More recently, anAvatar: The Last Airbenderfan made a highly detailed version of the show’sWestern Air Temple in Unreal Engine 5.
