Home 3D Art Showcase & Critiques

[UE4] Atmospheric Forest

polycounter lvl 2
Offline / Send Message
NICKYRIOT polycounter lvl 2
Hey :)

My name is Nicole Sochor. I've been in the game industry for a couple of years, worked at Ubisoft
Blue Byte on Assassin's Creed Identity and after that I decided to cofound my own company. At PIXELBRAVE I am currently managing projects and working as a 3D artist. To see more visit: http://pixelbrave.com/

This article we will be about a forest I created in Unreal Engine 4, check out the final video here:


Why this project:
I am a forest lover and a vagabond at heart and I often have the feeling that games have troubles communicating the "forest feeling". With this project I wanted to challenge myself and create forest scenes that would feel real and evoke different emotions. I chose to make the forest in Unreal Engine 4 because of its great lighting system and because I already had experiences with working in UDK.




How I started:
I did research on how forests grow and how they are actually built up. How the different layers of vegetation are working together, what natural compositions you often find and what kind of experiences people have in forests.



The assets:
For the assets I decided to go all out and do them myself. There are tons of tutorials out there with people who already encounter the same problems as you and that saved me a lot of time. For example I had to experiment quite a bit getting the grass to move right and not give the feeling as it was underwater [the seaweed problem].

The trees were a combination of handsculpting and speedtree. I had 2 Hero trees that were handsculpted and textured and the other trees are done with speedtree.


Modeling & Texturing:
The terrain was created in World Machine and reworked in Mudbox. The models were sculpted in Zbrush and modeled in 3ds Max. I personally like the workflow of starting out in Zbrush from a sphere, sculpt the asset (being careful with the amount of subdivisions to keep controle), decimate and export as an obj. Then import and optimise the topology within 3ds Max before projecting the high poly detail on the low poly. The baking would be done in 3ds Max with a cage-setup, projecting in zbrush with low and high detail subtools or using Xnormal depending on the Asset.



Texturing was done using Zbrush and Photoshop. During the many years of traveling I've created my own personal library with reference photos and textures that I photographed in Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Spain, Poland, Denmark and Belgium, these came in handy when I started building up my textures in Photoshop. Within Zbrush I used my own alpha brushes and cleaned up texturing seams. I don't have a favorite program and I'm not much in to keyboard shortcuts as I use many different programs, I use whatever gets the job done.

Due to time constrains I couldn't try out photogrammetry but I am looking forward to give this a shot in the future.

Lighting system:
I researched different moods from games, movies, etc. and looked up the different color palettes that for example The Witcher or Disney uses. Every mood is different and I had to test out and feel what works for each scene.


I had quite some problems with getting the bakes right though: but luckily we have an awesome community and a lot of nice and great artists that love to help each other out! So I got my problems fixed in no time. <3



Results and thoughts:
I learned a lot from this project! Especially to think more about the big picture. For something as complex as a forest, one rock might not be worth obsessing about when it's only adding 0.1% to the end result...

I hope you guys found this article useful and if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask :)

Byebye, Nicole

Replies

Sign In or Register to comment.