At this point, I’ve started asking myself “what do I really want to achieve here?”. Do I want to make this scene look realistic? Is it stylised? Maybe it is a blend of both? Eventually, I thought it would be a fair challenge to try and replicate all of the hand-painted details that have already been engraved into the source material as closely as possible in Unreal Engine 4 and see how far I can push composition of this scene, considering it was originally rendered in 4:3 (Classic TV) aspect ratio.

Blockout Phase

During the first stages of development, it was incredibly important to nail down correct building proportions according to the reference and carve out basic substractions to see the exact location of demolished areas. Eyeballing was not an option, so I started to look for effective alternatives that would allow me to do fast and precise blockout.

I have stumbled upon this cool program on GitHub that is called OnTopReplica that allows you to select and project any window from any program on your desktop on top of another application while controlling transparency, size and even click-through capabilities of initial window. You can get it here.

After overlaying my reference image, I would start messing around with BSP blocks inside of Unreal, making sure that the position and rotation of all meshes would align with buildings on the projected image. It is important to note that the camera that is being used during this process must remain in a fixed position at all times, in order to avoid any complications.