Restyling Van Buren

What is it and where does it come from

Developed by the Black Isle studio, the project of the game under the working title Van Buren was supposed to be the third part of the popular Fallout game series. But in 2003, Black Isle was disbanded and Interplay Entertainment filed for bankruptcy. This was the finale of the Van Buren project and the original Fallout series.

Today, all the accumulated materials on this project are in the public domain and, as far as I know, without encumbrance with licenses. However, these public resources are in an unusable state. Firstly, it is expected very low polygonal geometry of models and the use of extremely low resolution textures (in the early 2000s this was normal), and secondly, all meshes of models are destroyed by many errors in topology (I do not know the reasons, but I will assume that this is a consequence of extracting models from native engine data).

A few years ago, I started work on an ambitious fan project and did not deny myself the pleasure of working a little with the original asset of the legend. I made a selection of some models for assembling the shelter, I restored, modified in some places, and in some places redrawn the meshes of these models, performed UV mapping and created a new material.

For all models, a single PBR material (albedo, roughness, metallic, normal) is used, represented by an atlas of simple non-detailed textures, atlas size 2048*2048. For the sake of maintaining visual proximity, some segments of the atlas were created on the basis of Van Buren original textures (walls, ceiling, floor).

This is how I ended up with a small modular asset that is visually quite close to the original, very light and can be used in any game engine. One fine day, while putting things in order in my resource library, I again stumbled upon it and decided to post it, maybe it will come in handy for someone :-)

Updates

These are not all the Van Buuren resources that I planned to restore and add to this asset, but one day I switched to other tasks and abandoned this asset. If "Restyling Van Buren" is interesting to a sufficiently large number of people, it was not difficult for me to supplement and update this asset.