The True Scale of Blackreach: Skyrim in UNREAL ENGINE 5!

I made Blackreach in Unreal Engine 5 – at a more realistic and lore-accurate scale!

Part of an ongoing project to visualise a more realistic and lore accurate scale to Tamriel’s cities – so here’s Blackreach – now with sixteen times the detail!

Blackreach was always super interesting, both visually and lore-wise. A massive Dwemer cave system that was said to stretch underneath most of Skyrim itself. Elder Scrolls Online expanded on it a bit with the vampire stuff, but I thought I’d scale up the original cavern we got to explore in Skyrim.

Again, when operating at these scales, it’s not really the point to do a one-to-one recreation. Instead, it becomes more of a spiritual upgrade – to get the feeling and vibe of Blackreach, and give an impression for what a more realistic size would be...

Technically quite difficult to light, given that it was pretty much only lit by bioluminescent fungi, aetherium veins and the glow-worms, so Lumen certainly got a workout with this one…

I actually did start this several months ago, but the sheer scale and density made my 3060ti cry, so I kind of kept it in the back-burner for a while until I upgraded my gpu. If you were wondering what it takes to max out the 24GB vram of a 3090 at 1440p – well, this’ll do it (although do keep in mind that running on editor has a higher performance overhead that a stand-alone game).

Rendered out in Unreal Engine 5.3.2 on an RTX 3090. Using a mix of third party models and custom assets modelled in Blender. Nanite was used for all models and foliage; Hardware Lumen for global illumination and reflections.