This project works towards improving methods of simulating earthquake ground motions from dynamic rupture simulations for seismic hazard applications. This modeling effort incorporates features of the earthquake fault and rupture (through complex fault geometry, stress heterogeneity, etc.) that have been demonstrated from both observations and numerical simulations to affect resulting ground motions. Our investigation analyzes how earthquake rupture characteristics influence ground motion behavior and compares these synthetically generated ground motions with empirical ground motion models (GMMs). The goal of our work is to determine conditions that make broadband synthetic ground motions from dynamic ruptures more reliable in supplementing empirical models with simulation-derived information. We find the aggregated level of ground motion compares well with GMMs in terms of both distance decay and median ground motion at long and intermediate periods (e.g., 0.3-1 s). Some methods have lower than expected amplitudes at shorter periods, a focus of subsequent work. We observe that intra-event variability is highly dependent on hypocenter location, resulting from azimuthal changes in ground motion amplification. In addition to modeling ground motion, we also keep track of fault displacement along the surface trace of the fault, which ensures that we do not create unrealistic source events that may neglect constraints of physical ruptures.