League of Legends Player Recreates Summoner's Rift in Unreal Engine

Summoner’s Rift has gone through quite a few changes over the years as League of Legends’ [...]

By Tanner Dedmon

Summoner's Rift has gone through quite a few changes over the years as League of Legends' primary battleground, but a new fan-made project has managed to show the map like never before. An indie developer who goes by Wayne S. recreated Summoner's Rift in Unreal Engine 4 to give it a realistic flair that's teeming with lush landscapes, shadows, and tangled pathways through the jungle. A walkthrough of the map shared in a video from the creator shows it from different perspectives.

That video in question can be seen above as Wayne S. walks us through the stylish version of Summoner's Rift and how different parts of it were made. Wayne S. showed a few top-down looks at Summoner's Rift and outlined some of the goals for creating this map in Unreal Engine.

"The goal here was to maintain the level design of Summoner's Rift but completely change it from stylized to realistic," Wayne S. said. "This also needed to be visually appealing from both top-down as well as first-person. I tried my best to keep the atmosphere of the Rift but the same type of foliage you'd see from League of Legends."

Within the description of the video and the comments, the developer who created the map said it took them several weeks to complete the project and was a big learning experience. They added that some of the criticisms about this not working in an actual League game were warranted since extra details would need to be cut so as not to be overly distracting.

"This League of Legends scene took around 3 weeks, about 4-5 hours each day when not working on my main project," the creator said. "It was quite a learning experience, but it was well worth it. I learned a lot about making my environments seem more realistic just by forcing myself to do this."

It's not a version of Summoner's Rift that we'll probably ever see created in League itself since the game favors a uniquely stylized map as opposed to the realistic approach, and as the creator said, an overly realistic map could prove distracting at times. Over on the creator's ArtStation page, they said that they may create bases later but that the first attempt at the project would focus only on the gameplay areas.

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