The Locksmith's House [WIP] [UE4]
polycounter lvl 7
Hello fellow polycounters!
Not much freelance work these days, so, in the ever virtuous quest to improve my skills, this week I decided to start a new and challenging environment, and share with you all the (painful) process. I tried to put myself in the most unconfortable place I could to try and get the most out of it.
I have chosen this concept art, first of all, well, because it conveyed me a great feeling... but also for the important fact that I know about none of the things needed to pull it off. But I am itching to see it move.
I put down a small and randomly ordered, but comprehensive, list of the things I should come out having learned after this:
- creating a vegetation mesh (SD/Modo)
- setting up an animated vegetation material (UE4)
- setting up distance fields shadows for said vegetation (UE4)
- sculpting a landscape (UE4)
- sculpting a landscape (UE4)
- setting up a landscape material (UE4)
- implementing a cloth simulation (UE4)
- creating stylized clouds with terrain shadows projections (UE4)
- setting up a landscape spline (UE4)
- setting up a VFX in Cascade (UE4)
- creating a bunch of stylized materials (Substance Designer)
Now, I think I know at least the basics of most of these things, but I have never actually done any of them in practice. It's too much, you say? Probably. Almost certainly. But I have a good feeling. So let's keep going, and I hope you'll bear with me and my (hopefully) dissipating ignorance.
And, without further ado, here's the concept art:
Original concept by amazing artist Cathleen McAllister
Replies
First pass blockout for the house (I had a lot of trouble matching the picture's perspective, so much that I concluded there are some liberties here and there in the concept). I'll refine the shapes later to try and match the cartoony deformations of the roof especially.
PS: I was (and still am) quite confused on the size of the top balcony. And the size of the door on the balcony under the key.
Another blockout, this time for clothes, clothesline, and relative poles:
And the first pass on the grass material in Substance Designer.
I started with a single stem, warped it in a few different ways, and then haphazardly slapped various transformed instances to make the final composition. (Only afterwards I read that I would have had an easier time with the FX-Map node? Not entirely sure because I never used the node yet)
Then applied a couple of gradient maps for color, and generated opacity, normal, and roughness maps. Final result for this first pass:
So, I have been reading and dissecting other's people work on vegetation.
I went for a Masked/Subsurface/2-Sided material, instead of UE4's 2-Sided Foliage shader, because I was getting bad results on the flowers meshes (probably because the flowers faces have a vertical orientation).
Most useful thing I learned in the process (from this great article) is to use custom normals pointing upwards, like this:
Another great thing I learned is how to use Subsurface Scattering. I made a mask for the areas I wanted to have the effect. That's basically the grass stems from top fading halfway to the bottom, and the flowers petals gradually from edges to center. To mask out the stems I picked the Green channel from Texture Coordinates, which already conveniently outputs a b/w gradient using the vertical axis of the mesh's UVs, and multiplied that to the mask texture I made earlier. The disable switch is to remove the vertical gradient when using the materials on flowers specifically.
Finally, the most fun part, implementing the wind effect. I made this noise texture (it's a blurred clouds noise). One large tiling for the main wind, and another smaller and offset one to add some sideway noise.
I added various controls to it, direction, strength, speed, size, the usuals stuff. But the most important aspect is the grounding effect, without it the grass roots were moving with everything else, looking pretty awful.
I solved it with a Lerp, where A is the wind, and B is zero (no wind). For its alpha I again picked the Texture Coordinate Green channel, to get the mesh's vertical uv axis as a nice gradient and added a control parameter to it:
Added more pretties to the scene:
- chimney smoke
- clouds w/ rolling shadows
- wind effect on the clothesline
- billboard trees on the bg hill
Here's a couple screenshots, and a 20-seconds video below, to better appreciate the moving parts.
(sorry about the interlacing by the way, but I haven't yet figured out how to improve UE4 Sequencer's video quality).
I'll make another post later to briefly show how I accomplished these few things, particularly the rolling shadows!
This is the current state of the scene:
Since the last update I added the following:
- Foreground rock(s). It's iterated three times but it's just one model. My first ever sculpted rock!
- Stone path. This took me some time to figure out/chose how to do it. Basically I ended up using Substance Designer to make a height map, then I made a model with it in Modo with displacement, retopo'd and baked normals, and finally textured in Painter. I then placed it as a Landscape Spline. Not being too great a technical artist, I found a quick and dirty way to place vegetation only in the interstices. I created a flat temporary model that represented the negative area of the stone path. I then painted the vegetation on it and switched it back to the stone path mesh.
- The landscape material (it uses a few placeholder textures for now). I learned the basics of landscape materials using UE4 content examples (there's a map specific to landscapes which can be dissected easily for didactic purposes, highly recommended for learners!)
- Butterfly (I'm still trying to figure out how to make it fly, for the moment it simply uses a vertical pixel offset to simulate wing flapping, technique I learned by studying how the butterflies in EpicZenGarden were made)
- I have also added thickness to the flapping clothes (I was not aware that it was possible to use more than simple meshes with 2sided materials, looks way better)
And I'm currently working on the background buildings, and the first iterations of the house materials. Sneak peek:
As always, If you guys have any feedbacks or suggestion on how to make the butterflies fly, for example, I'm all ears
I discarded the SimpleGrassWind node early on because I thought it was not that good, but I might try it again with the grounding effect I have in the current material. It might also be cheaper than my current noise wind. (gotta check!)
I never tried World Machine, but it has been recommended to me many times... I think I read it even got updated recently after many years of radio silence? Anyway, I also wanted to try match the concept art's mountains by hand, to learn UE4 terrain sculpting. And in the end I kinda think WM would make the mountains look too realistic for this scene?
Can't wait to get to texturing it, but first have to finish its materials in SD!