UE4 Lighting Study: Offworld

dralex789

Hey guys, over the break made up another lighting study in UE4. Only have some screens at the moment but will post a couple breakdown pictures later in the week. The terrain was done in World Machine with the help of GeoGlyph and textures were done in photoshop/substance. Only other thing worth noting is that the terrain is not "Unreal Landscape" but just meshes. I used low geo meshes with explicit UV's, then baked heightmaps from higher poly meshes and combined them with height maps from the terrain textures. That way when the tessellation starts affecting the meshes, it also forms the terrain into a higher quality form.

Vimeo link here  https://vimeo.com/150539274







Hey guys, just wanted to add to this with some breakdown images.

Nuclear Angel

It is gorgeous. Will you do any more lighting conditions other than the one you have? I am looking forward to the breakdowns! 

Jack M.

Great work! The bubbles and light steam are a great finish for excellent terrain work that bring the scene to life.

PogoP

Nice work! Lovely atmosphere you got going on here.

FreneticPonies

Very cool, I like the meteors and bubbly tarpit stuff!

vbaguirov

Looks gorgeous. How did you make the bubbles? Are they animated models? How long did it take you to make that scene?

dralex789

Hey guys, thanks for the kind words. As for more lighting passes I may at some point but I'm not 100% sure yet.

The bubbles are mesh particles with vertex coloring to aid in some animated shape expansion as they grow pop. They then erode away (based on the same vertex coloring) as they pop and some other particles spawn to keep the conservation of mass a bit (though that doesn't show super well with the video on every bubble). The last big step was lighting them with some SSS to help give them some color as they get thinner.

Regarding time it took me a bit under a week.  Here's a bit of a breakdown
1 pebble texture ~1 day (it was done a while ago)
Messing around in world machine, height map and texture ~1 day
Getting the terrain in engine, baking maps, making shaders ~1 day
The bubbles and contrails, and the couple of smaller rocks ~ 1 day
Placing some random meshes, Lighting and Post ~ 1 day 
Rendering out video, screens, etc ~ half a day 

Hope that helps, and I'll get some more textures and stuff up tonight

R00

Great work Dralex! Really great atmosphere you've created here. I would love to see a breakdown of the bubbles

dralex789

Hey guys just wanted to post and  say I updated the top thread with some breakdown images and some breakdown stuff.

Gilgamesh

I'd pay real money for that bubble shader/particle system, excellent sir!

Sean VanGorder

Awesome work and great information, thanks for the breakdown images

Shurkuris

Points for atmosphere and presentation of your work, but... using World Machine to generate a high level over-view of the terrain, then zooming in really close like your a couple of inches off the ground is really messing with the scale composition of your shots.

The image you got off the height-map has all the characteristics of pictures taken at extremely high altitudes. You should not use it as a "close up" of the planet's terrain as it wouldn't match that in reality.

Snefer

Brilliant stuff, thanks for sharing

sky_boxer

Shurkuris said:

Points for atmosphere and presentation of your work, but... using World Machine to generate a high level over-view of the terrain, then zooming in really close like your a couple of inches off the ground is really messing with the scale composition of your shots.

The image you got off the height-map has all the characteristics of pictures taken at extremely high altitudes. You should not use it as a "close up" of the planet's terrain as it wouldn't match that in reality.

I agree with your observation! Looking great except that it looks like a miniature due to the reasons stated above and also because of  your choice of Depth of field. The DOF here should be very deep and not shallow considering the kind of terrain features u have which as Shurkuris mentioned, looks like an aerial view.

But those bubbles looks so awesome! Great job!

dtschultz

Very cool!  Thanks for sharing your process.

dralex789

sky_boxer said:

Shurkuris said:

Points for atmosphere and presentation of your work, but... using World Machine to generate a high level over-view of the terrain, then zooming in really close like your a couple of inches off the ground is really messing with the scale composition of your shots.

The image you got off the height-map has all the characteristics of pictures taken at extremely high altitudes. You should not use it as a "close up" of the planet's terrain as it wouldn't match that in reality.

I agree with your observation! Looking great except that it looks like a miniature due to the reasons stated above and also because of  your choice of Depth of field. The DOF here should be very deep and not shallow considering the kind of terrain features u have which as Shurkuris mentioned, looks like an aerial view.

But those bubbles looks so awesome! Great job!

Thanks for the feedback guys! I definitely took a bit of a risk when playing with world machine for the smaller meshes. I knew that some of the visual features would potentially give the wrong scale of terrain, but at the some time I wanted to make something a little bit off and weird with the terrain scale and use the atmospherics to make up the difference. If I were to do it again I would probably keep the off scale of the terrain but aim to find another visual element besides the lighting to create scale.

Also thanks for the kind words from everyone!

abcdethan

Very inspiring! it would be great to see you flesh out the environment with some compositional elements that can be seen in your reference.

Ognyan

Looks amazing! Thanks for the breakdown!

Jonas Ronnegard

really awsome work!