A free download of an interactive Star Wars scene created in Unreal Engine 4 has been released, making us all wish this was the early stages of a full game.

The fan project is headed by Obsidian Entertainment’s senior environment artist Jason Lewis with the aid of 16 other people all working in their spare time.

“In total there are 17 people contributing to this project in varying capacities. This is a just-for-fun personal project that we are all contributing to for no reason other than we are all a bunch of super Star Wars fans and with all the Star Wars awesomeness going on these days, we all thought it would be a good time to jump in and produce a quality fan art project,” explained Lewis. “In addition to just being a bunch of super Star Wars nerds, several of us have been wanting an excuse to learn Unreal 4 for some time now, so we figured that this was a perfect opportunity.”

The scene began life when Lewis decided he wanted to build a 3D Millennium Falcon.

“I am a huge Star Wars fan and I have always wanted to build a CG Falcon, but just never seemed to get around to doing it until now,” he explained. “It started out as a simple 3ds Max model, but then I thought it might be pretty neat to see it run in real-time, and since I had no Unreal 4 experience prior to this, I figured this could be a great project to learn UE4 with, so my goal was to build the most highly detailed real-time Falcon that anyone has ever seen, and I think I have pulled it off, except for maybe the Falcon model from the recent ILM X-Labs VR demo that was at GDC a few months ago. Theirs might be a bit more detailed than mine, or at least the two might be on par with each other, but theirs is more accurate to the Studio model from what I have been able to see from online videos, whereas with mine, I took some liberties with the details to make it work better with my scene.”

Lewis explains that whilst the original idea was to simply create the Falcon sitting in Docking Bay 94 and look at it in real-time, this escalated into a much bigger project.

“I thought it would be neat to add the interior to the docking bay, and then maybe some of the surrounding Mos Eisley city, then I thought “hey, let’s put the Mos Eisley Cantina in as well!” It was at this point that I realized the scope of this project had grown beyond my ability to finish it by myself, so I extended an invitation to several of the artists working with me at Obsidian to help out with this project in their free time, and I got many very enthusiastic YES responses, so I divided up the work based on the time and effort commitments that volunteers were willing to put into it,” Lewis said.

The Star Wars project is about 90 per cent complete, but you can give it a whirl on your PC right now. A VR version is coming to Oculus Rift and Vive.

You’ll find much more information and download links for the project over on 80 Level, including some tips for those looking to get into the industry.

Source: 80 Level