Hello everyone, this is Denis Weber.
Heroes 3 is one of my favorite games from my childhood. I can call it the king of turn-based strategy games. Once again, while playing Heroes, I thought about what a castle from a game could look like in 3D, but all I had was a low quality screenshot.
If you prefer the video format, I will leave a link to the video at the end of the post.
While the whole world is going crazy over Game of Thrones and its many prequels and sequels, gamers from the 90s still love the game that came out almost 25 years ago.
Surprisingly, even today the game Heroes 3 looks good and can be truly enjoyed by players.
Countless sequels once again confirm that the third part remains the best game in the series. It is so popular that unofficial additions are still being released nowadays. For example, the Factory town, which was released at the end of 2023 and is already loved by players around the world.
I decided to look at what the town from the game Heroes 3 would look like if it were created in 3D. And all I had was a screenshot of not the best quality.
First of all, I needed to create all the models in the game from scratch.
Large mechanisms, with gears and many metal structures of the most unusual shapes.
It’s good that in the game you could look at a location with buildings that had not yet been built and also see different stages of their construction. So now I have more than one screenshot.
It was important to determine the correct size of the buildings from the very beginning. And a human figure is best suited for this. You simply set the real height of a person for the model and you’re done.
To be honest I changed the size of the buildings more than once. But at least I tried.
To make the town as similar as possible to the original, it was necessary to put all the buildings in the right places. Sometimes I think that my channel should have been about 2D graphics.
I immediately decided that I would build the town in the Unreal Engine 5.
If anyone has not heard of the Unreal Engine, it is a game engine that simply revolutionizes the idea of graphics in games. It is so high-capacity that even one person can assemble an entire 3D city in a couple of weeks, and your computer will easily process it.
I decided to create all the buildings in strict order, the way they are displayed in the game, so that there would be no temptation to do something easier first.
So I began from the Capitol. It brings 4000 of gold every day. It is a majestic building with a red carpet at the entrance. It would be convenient to hold Hollywood premieres here.
Quite a bit of time has passed and so far everything looks more like a children's construction set, but believe me, soon everything will look a little more realistic.
The next building in line is Castle. It is one of the most important buildings in the game, because there you can hire different creatures for battle.
Castle looks quite unusual. It is made of bricks and some parts are made of either rusty metal or gold. One can only envy the imagination of the towns's designers.
I admit that creating gears is my weak point. I can never figure out immediately how many edges I need to add to the cylinder to get the correct number of teeth. So with just a few tries I did what I needed to do. Well, or at least approximately what is needed.
I haven't dived into the technical aspects of how all the buildings operate, but it seems to me that these gears can somehow open the gates? Write in the comments if I'm wrong.
In the tavern you can hire heroes. The very heroes after whom the game was named. The appearance of the tavern changes from town to town, but the essence remains the same. This is a small cozy building for large feasts.
The local tavern has beautiful multi-colored stained glass windows that make this particular tavern stand out from others. But I'll add them a little later.
The town is gradually transforming from a set of cubes into something more interesting.
And next up is my favorite building - Blacksmith. It may just be about giving you a cart of supplies, but it looks exciting on the outside.
Blacksmith is a mighty hangar with large gates and an unusual roof and three impressive chimneys standing next to it. I probably spent the most time creating this building. The unusual appearance adds complexity to the modeling.
It was necessary to calculate the number of segments to prevent overloading the geometry and at the same time, make sure that Blacksmith did not look square. Very soon you will see if I succeeded in doing this.
Resource silo is a large golden barrel with a valve installed on it. If all the town's resources are stored here, I can't even imagine how the town still exists. But Resource silo gives one crystal per day, which can be very useful.
Mage Guild has five levels of coolness and with its help, any hero in the game can use spells. To model the building, I essentially had to create models for the first floor, and then copy them and scale them down slightly for the other floors.
Mana Generator, as the name implies, increases the amount of mana of the hero who is trying to defend his castle during an attack. Since this is a magical building, I have no questions about how it works. Mana Generator is a large tower with spinning rings on top. Oh, if only all the buildings in the town were so easy to model.
All the buildings look really impressive. Each of them is created in its own style and at the same time does not stand out from the general style of the town.
Artifact merchant is a place where you can exchange resources for artifacts. In general, artifacts are a separate strong point of the Heroes game. When I first started playing, I didn’t really think about what they were needed for, but after a while I began to understand it much better.
If I were asked to model a bank building by memory, this is exactly what I would create. Like all banks, this one gives loans, which you then have to repay. The bank has an unusual polyhedron shape. And the large roof made of pure gold means that loans are in great demand in the town.
And now we get to the buildings with which you can expand your army. In an inconspicuous-looking Ranch you can hire strong Armadillo warriors. But in essence, this is the most ordinary barn. In a human town, horses would live here at most, or pigs at worst. But we must admit that at least they have a roof over their heads.
There is a mill next to the barn, which forms an improved version of the Ranch, where the Bellwether Armadillo live. I hope the buildings do not have a backstory that explains why, for example, an ordinary mill improves the type of warriors. Otherwise, in the eyes of real Heroes 3 fans, I will look a little stupid.
Most of the buildings are done so I started modeling with Halfling Adobe. When I hear the word Halfling, I immediately imagine the endless grasslands of New Zealand and Peter Jackson on a pony next to a hobbit hole.
In this universe, everything is a little different. Halfling Adobe is on a hill, and if you hadn't told me that Halfling lived here, I wouldn't have thought of it. The building reminds me of a village house in one of the Greek villages. You probably already realized that I have never been to Greece.
In the Foundry and its improved version, you can hire Mechanics and Engineers. These units are useful because they can restore mechanisms during battle. Outwardly, they look like classic inhabitants of the post-apocalypse.
The building itself is a tower with a large chimney and some technical structures nearby. Someday I will create the concept of my own castle, but for now I will continue to follow the inspiration of Heroes.
The Manufactory is the most technically advanced building in the town. There is a huge metal wheel driven by a piston that comes out of a barrel with a pipe on top. And I really had to try to get the mechanism to work as it should in the 3D version.
In addition to the mechanism with the wheel, there is a large brick hangar with a conveyor and an attic. Unfortunately, the screenshots from the game are of such poor quality that even neural networks couldn’t help improve the quality of the picture, so I had to use my imagination and create some things from scratch.
There are only four buildings left and all 3D models will be done. I can't wait to start adding textures to make the town look as much like the original as possible.
Catacombs is something like a mine, and in the improved version it is a mine with a big beautiful door. Sandworm and Olgoi-Khorkhoi live here. A magical glow emanates from the Catacombs and those who pass by should understand that it is better not to disturb the warriors.
The Watchtower is located higher than all other buildings in the town. It has a great view for Gunslinger and Bounty Hunter. In general, it was easier to make many models based on the same primitives from blocking. The dimensions were already set and it was only necessary to add more detailed parts.
Serpentarium reminds me of a greenhouse where the palm trees grow. And this is not surprising because here you can hire Couatl and Crimson Couatl. These are creatures that resemble both dragons and parrots. They have a terrifying appearance and beautiful multi-colored plumage at the same time. And at the entrance, there are statues of dragons on large columns.
One of the last buildings I needed to model was the Gantry. The most expensive building in the town with powerful warriors inside - Dreadnought and Juggernaut. To put it very simply, this is an ordinary industrial hangar. But on the other hand, it is a work of art.
Large iron beams are placed on a stone base, and at the top there is a hanging mechanism with a heavy golden Dreadnought statue. Gantry looks interesting and modeling it was no less interesting. Of course, I didn’t have a ready-made Dreadnought model, so I had to improvise.
Lightning Rod is the holy grail. If the player is diligent enough and finds all the pieces of the puzzle, he will unearth a Lightning Rod, which gives 5000 per day, increases the growth of creatures in the castle and strikes all enemies with lightning in the first round of each battle. Useful and powerful thing.
I finally finished modeling all the main buildings in the game. It would be possible to leave everything like this, just add some textures, but I think we want to get a truly interesting and lively town, so I began to model other small buildings such as market shelves, local residents’ houses, a water tower and other props. These are barrels, benches, jugs and many of those things that can be located in a town like a Factory.
It's time to create a UW Unwrap. If you are not involved in 3D, this has to be done so that the textures added to the model would be displayed correctly. I can't say that this is an exciting process, so I’ll skip it and talk about the most interesting thing, about the moment when gray sets of polygons become buildings from the real world.
I decided that the simplest and most correct option would be to use free textures from the Blender Kit add-on, and then transfer the painted models into the Unreal Engine. It was necessary to select colors and materials similar to the reference, and bake some of the textures so that they would be displayed correctly in the game engine.
Once I finished adding all the textures, all that was left was to set up the scene in Unreal Engine. I just need to arrange cameras, set up the environment, fix textures, remove tiling. In general, work for three weeks. The article is already quite long, so if you are interested in reading about working in Unreal Engine, write in the comments and I will talk about it in one of my new articles.
I'm very glad that I finished the project and saw it through to completion. At some point I thought that the creation of the Factory town would never end, there was so much work to be done.You can watch the finished video with animation on my channel Polyroad3D.
I'm pleased with the result and am already looking forward to create a new city from the game.
Thanks for reading and see you later. Something very cool will be here soon.