Urquhart Castle Environment Project

PLATFORMS:
Windows PC

ENGINE:
Unity 5

TOOLS USED:
Maya, Photoshop, Krita, Wacom/XP-Pen Tablet

DURATION:
5 Months (6 weeks In-Engine Development)

COMPLETION:
2019

TEAM SIZE:
1

ROLE:
Design, Modelling, Art, UI/UX, Testing

Project Information

This project was worked on for my honours year at Abertay University, my goal was to research a historical site which could explored within a 3D game environment. In this case, it was the castle Urquhart in the Scottish Highlands. The site in modern day lies as mostly a ruin, and the purpose of this project was to recreate the castle as it would have been at the peak of its lifetime, roughly the 15th to 16th century. Initially, the plan was to represent only a specific period in its life, one where the physical building itself would have been the largest. However I later decided to represent three specific stages in its lifetime to best explore the story behind the site itself. In the end I decided to turn the project into a psuedo museum piece where the user could explore the 3D environment from a top down R.T.S style view and interact with UI elements to learn about the site.

The project was created in Unity 5, and Blender was used to model the architecture of the site. Textures were taken from photo reference of the site and then adjusted to be used within 3D model U.V maps. In order for a user to explore the site, I added UI elements in which to switch between the three time periods and UI pop-ups for users to click on and show information on the adjacent parts of the site.