Breaking down The Rats of “A Plague Tale”

Will try to not speak too much, and leave it to the content to handle the talk. With the most recent gameplay video of the amazing anticipated game (at least for me) A Plague Tale, I was fascinated by the rats in that demo, and I’ve seen some people speaking about the possibilities of having this in the final game, and others saying the game would fail to include that amount or would launch with less rats as a downgrade. So I wanted to put a proof of concept that this amount of rats and even 10x times more is still doable (speaking from Unreal + Niagara point of view). And at the same time, knock a new tiny closed door for the Unreal Engine users, to show that the huge world and possibilities relying beyond that door.

I’ve done many similar things in the past with Unreal and Cascade , some was experimental and others really saw some light. So I wanted this time to go ahead, do it with Niagara, Unreal and Epic’s tool-set. I used to have some 3DsMax and Maya custom built scripts, that give kinda similar results, but I wanted this time to use official unreal (4.22) not my own fork, and use any & every thing available to everyone (same max script, same rigging methods,…etc.) so I show some light in a direction that most of the users might not see. So, I hope I did good job with this one.

The full project source (will be updated with new tips as soon as I allocate more time to that project) is free and open for anyone on github:
https://github.com/mamoniem/APlagueTaleRats

And the tutorial, already uploaded (FINALLY!!!) to you tube in two different versions, as defined below:

• Short Tutorial, ~10 minutes, which including the main steps, guidelines, the breakdown of the method and highlighting the core tips of the process.
• Full Tutorial, ~37 minutes, which including every single detail about the process starting from getting the mesh, ending up with the entire map full of 50k reactive rats!

-m