"Class 08" - UE4 Real-time Ray-tracing Environment

A scene inspired by urban railway here in the UK prior to privatisation in the late 90's. A class 08 diesel-electric shunting locomotive sits on the mainline waiting to spring into life.

All meshes created by me in 3DS MAX with 99% of the materials coming from Quixel Megascans surfaces.

The engine is the focus and every panel, feature and rivet has been meticulously modelled from plans I found. Weighs in under 100k polys which isn’t too bad for a hero asset.

Despite being pleased with the still image output, this project was a bit of a disaster...

I did intend to create a much larger environment to make a playable experience to test real-time performance versus visual quality on my RTX2080. Sadly, the project corrupted and I was only able to salvage the assets.

I then attempted to make a movie of a smaller scene demonstrating how I had created an entire track system with physics-based animation for the engine and trucks with bogies that followed the rails. Again, I messed up because I updated the project from 4.24 to 4.25 without making a backup (stupid I know).

Whilst the scene was intact, I couldn’t add a camera cuts track to the level sequencer without it crashing.
So, I settled for this still and added some foreground and background set dressing.

It’s a shame I didn’t get to complete a larger project with these assets as I have a whole modular factory building asset collection, spline-based tools for creating raised track sections, walls and the tracks themselves.