St. Michael cave

Hi everyone!
today I share a virtual tour with the reconstruction of the cave of St. Michael in Minervino Murge, province of Bari in Italy.
This is a mysterious and particular place that is immersed in the countryside of the deep south of the country.

So I resumed a pending work of mine (I had already made a first reconstruction of the outside some time ago) and I finished what I had in mind with a view of the inside of the cave.

Although the interior was created and rendered in Unreal Engine, the initial part (the view of the exterior) and the manipulation of the model resulting from the survey was realized in Blender. I texturized and baked the textures in Blender 3.2 to then export the model of the interior and enrich it with details, as well as lighting and finally rendering it in UE5.

I must say that I am satisfied with the workflow that can be achieved by combining the two software in this way, I will probably share something about this in the future on my channel. So subscribe if you like :slight_smile:

Postproduction in DaVinci Resolve

Questions, comments or suggestions are welcome as always :wink:

Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/klbWkd

Thanks for watching

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This is very cool! I love how much detail you’ve added, and your lighting is truly gorgeous. I very much enjoyed looking this over and I hope to see more work from you :slight_smile:

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Beautiful! Did you visit the site yourself and take photos?

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Stunningly beautiful. A masterpiece. I’m also curious about how you constructed the physical data for your model. 3D scan, photographic references, etc?Well done!

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Thanks a lot, It was a cool work to do, I tried to stay faithful to the ambience

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Thanks. Well to answer also to @Musashidan , as I written on the yt description I was involved in a survey at the place with geologists, so it is all scanned with laser (the interior) and I took a chance to do the outside with my drone. Then I had to deal with the data, was a long process and I stylized everything a little bit, but tried to “follow the lines” as much as I could :slight_smile:

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Oh wow! I thought you meant you had looked at surveys of the area online. I didn’t realise you were involved in scanning the whole site. Amazing.

Yep I was there with this team a while ago, they are doing stability analysis and such… I obviously took the opportunity and got interested in the artistic part, let’s say … :blender_logo_64_png:

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You’re on the #featured row! :+1:

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very good work !
Is the cave entrance in the chapel ? Or beside it ?
This would be great to know more about the geography of the place :slight_smile:

Is the video render an UDK or a blender render ? If it is UDK, is it rendered in realtime ?

Thanks and happy blending ! :smiley:

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Breathtaking, what a great atmosphere! Thanks for posting, I enjoyed the walkthrough very much. :slight_smile:

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Awesome! thanks a lot!! :orange_heart:

I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!

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Thank you! The cave entrance is just behind the monumental chapel. As you go through the main door you see there, you are already in front of the upper cave opening, so the chapel was built right above it.
As for the rendering, the first part (outside env) was rendered in Blender Cycles. The interior env. is rendered entirely in UE, so yes, this part is actually realtime :slight_smile:

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would you have an .exe so that we could have a RT walk in it ?
Would be great :stuck_out_tongue:
Thanks and happy blending !

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Yep Blender and UE5… bros forever amazing work makes me wanna play this level if it were a game :smile:

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Actually they asked me for a VR experience for this one and another project I am woking on… so… stay tuned! :wink: :stuck_out_tongue: will probably post something like this soon…

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oh great :smiley:

will you post update and global WIP here ?

What engine will you use ? U3D or UE5 ?

Happy blending !

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Well, I’ll still use UE5 for this and would be glad to post the WIP here, but since it will be probably realized entirely in UE, I don’t know if the topic would fit this community… but still, if you check my channel on youtube or artstation profile it will most likely be everything there :wink: Thanks for your kind comments anyway! :slight_smile:

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Well i’m not sure an UE5 topic is welcome here. Maybe some BA forum team member could give an answer ?
IMHO it would really be interresting for all those using blender as a serious gaming modeler.
This is what i do in mly own project of Carcassonne medieval city here: Carcassonne Medieval city
I had a discuss about the relevant existence of this kind of topic and i finally were left quiet by the ‘blender-or-death’ people.
From my point of view, RT render engines discusses are pretty relevant here as some people use blender for modeling and game engines as final platform. I wish more people use blender as modeler for their games and speaking of final products here ( of course, unity 3D shaderlab questions or Jobs questions are out of topic here ) should IMO bring people to blender’s world.

Even if few people follow my WIP on this project, i still post here U3D screenshots as final view of what i do in blender. And be sure that blender is mandatory to me ! Without it, Carcassonne 3D ( and my other projects ) were never born !

So i’ll try to catch your YT channel and follow it :smiley: but in sincerely think you should post here the WIP :wink:
Maybe i’m worng, maybe not :stuck_out_tongue:

Happy blending !

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