Exploration Craft - Breakdown

Intro | Sound on!

The red arrows show the directions of the Physics Thrusters of the 3 Engines

Modelling movable parts

Physical simulation

Bunch of assets I'd like to reuse in the game project

The exterior consists of over 600 parts as Nanite handles separated objects more performant

The ship has no UV maps, instead I adapted the [WorldAlignedNormal] and [WorldAlignedTexture] (Triplanar mapping) functions to work in local space. "VERITÀ" is just a decal.

Vertex color bake for Curvature, Thickness and AO. I Still need to optimize the geo density.

Thanks for watching, stay tuned!

Little insight into my WIP on the Exploration Craft "Verità"
WIP
The Exploration Craft "Verità" is one of the main vehicles in "LOA", my current game project. It's look is inspired by Ian McQue and the game concept is a mix of Myst and Subnautica, my favorite games.
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For a solo dev, efficiency is key. I tried to switch between software as little as possible, as importing and exporting are time consuming and error-prone. All materials were completely created in UE 5 using Quixel Bridge textures, material layers and instancing. This way I can make use of the 3D scanned assets and keep quality consistency. Having no UV-maps saved me a lot of time, adjustments of meshes needed only a rebake in Blender, which I also automated with a Python script.
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Tools with Geometry Nodes are super useful for placing screws and bolts, you can easily add a random rotation and make sure they are distributed evenly. For the front roof I set up a deformer to add a little damage, it's still in development but I plan to use it on many more parts.
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Now the basics of the ship are working, but I still have to tweak the controls, model the interior, fix some materials (eg. texel density, should be easy with my workflow). Maybe I'll also UV-map a few parts for better looks and eventually performance.
I hope you like it! I'm happy to answer questions and any feedback is greatly appreciated!

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