[UE4] Dense Rainforest (Finished/SmallBreakdown)
polycounter lvl 6
Hiya guys!
Since a couple of weeks (with a large break in between couple of months) I Started this project to get to know speedtree and to get my foliage to look as good as I could (mainly because I was so inspired by Uncharted 4 foliage and the talks about them from Jacob Norris over on CGSociety (seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDIZa4O3jP4), I am making slow progress but I just love to experiment with new features and tips/tricks I get along the way.
Feel free to give me any feedback/critique, I'm trying to get to a point of realism with this, and I know that I can improve a lot! Especially on the lighting of the environment.
You can also checkout my Trello board to have a look at what I got planned.
https://trello.com/b/qLMGLP5U/foliage-project
Suggestions are always welcome.
Latest
Things I have thinkered around with on this project so far
The initial grass blades, these are still used now, but I plan to bake them down onto a plane to reduce the polycount heavily. But I'm also pondering over trying to lod them out super quickly and see what result this gives me.
Hope this wasn't to much of a wall of text for you guys!
Thanks for stopping by!
Since a couple of weeks (with a large break in between couple of months) I Started this project to get to know speedtree and to get my foliage to look as good as I could (mainly because I was so inspired by Uncharted 4 foliage and the talks about them from Jacob Norris over on CGSociety (seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDIZa4O3jP4), I am making slow progress but I just love to experiment with new features and tips/tricks I get along the way.
Feel free to give me any feedback/critique, I'm trying to get to a point of realism with this, and I know that I can improve a lot! Especially on the lighting of the environment.
You can also checkout my Trello board to have a look at what I got planned.
https://trello.com/b/qLMGLP5U/foliage-project
Suggestions are always welcome.
Latest
Things I have thinkered around with on this project so far
- Getting to know dynamic lights, and all the dynamic shadow settings
- Light propagation volumes (Also know as Dynamic Global Illumination, Experimental feature)
- Speedtree (had no prior experience with this program)
- Balancing SSS on foliage material
- Some plugins for maya to scatter foliage on a surface (painter in maya as well)
The initial grass blades, these are still used now, but I plan to bake them down onto a plane to reduce the polycount heavily. But I'm also pondering over trying to lod them out super quickly and see what result this gives me.
Hope this wasn't to much of a wall of text for you guys!
Thanks for stopping by!
Replies
Also, I'd recommend making a mic and mask to tint some of the leaves for more color variation. ND also has a foliage artist who traditionally models and paints their foliage (from what I've gathered)
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/m6Qqy
My SSS shader is just a mask that I made in substance and I control that via a lerp between the mask and a black color so I can control the SSS a bit more in engine.
(if this sounds like chinese to you I would be happy to take a screenshot! )
And btw, that stuff that Naughty Dog did on the foliage is just mind blowing, it looks so freaking cool man!
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks so much @Adelphia I really love foliage as well, and doing this project only makes me love it more haha, I did reduce the grass blades a bit, as well as bake them onto a plane because they just were ridiculous in polycount, although they lost some shape when baking to planes, might have a look if I can find a good middle ground.
And yeah, I think the glossyness is still around in my last shot. But I do need to get in there and do a lot of rebalacing, but it is quite easy as the parameters are all controlled within unreal.
Really appreciate the feedback guys, thanks so much!
Now onto some more WIP!
Got 2 different shots, got some good feedback!
I like this first shot, but I really needed to think a bit more on logical foliage placement.
Went in and deleted/replaced parts of the foliage to make it a bit more varied, also got some more work done on the palm leaves, maybe I'll do some bark textures next, that's gonna be a challenge for me as I have never done anything like it, but we will see how it goes! And that's why I'm doing this, to improve!
Some old water shader that I am trying to blow new life into, the edges need a lot of work tho!
Some rocks would be nice as well (and some good ground textures now that I look at them)
Cheers for the feedback already guys, would love to know what you think!
Pretty please ^-^
So the way this is setup is just a quick thing to make it easier for me to adjust the SSS mask on the fly until I have the definitive ones ( and this helps me because I don't need to have a specific SSS map for all my foliage just yet, this allows quick iteration )
So what I do, is I feed it the SSS map, and have a color, and the "TexORColor" Parameter lets me blend between the two where "0" is the texture and "1" is the color, I then multiply this with the SSS color (which is also a parameter that I can adjust on the fly) and then feed this to the SSS input.
I can control the SSS strength with another parameter attached to the "Opacity" input, as this controls the SSS strength.
Hope you can follow on this, if not, let me know!
Full material (current state) Can be seen below
Hope you guys can read the shitty screencap haha
Boosted the LPV and did some more texturing as well!
Let me know what you think people!
Got some nice moving shadows and stuff already going in, already did first pass on the sunrise as well, but not shown in the video, update coming soon!
Feedback more then welcome!
Still trying to optimize this scene a bit more, because it is only running at 30 fps on my laptop at the moment, but it is all dynamic and it has dynamic GI going and all that stuff.
If anyone has some good optimisation tips for unreal would be greatly appreciated
Also other tips and feedback are more then welcome!
For optimization, usually making LOD for foliage helps a lot but i am sure you know it
Been reworking the whole scene, taking a step back and trying to really push the realism in lighting and such, it is hard to "restart" like this but something wasnt feeling right, still seems like something is missing... and also, I need to add something of interest to the scene and I am exploring options at the moment
This is what I had before doing some initial tweaks (before I took a step back and reworked the whole scene)
And here is what I did during last (Superbusy) week/weekend.
Updated the scale of the trees, added some more smaller variations of the large tree that I have now, also worked on some Horta as a more close to ground foliage, still need to add a lot of texture/color variation to all of my current assets.
Also tried some stuff using HDRI's instead of using the base thingy that comes with Unreal, looks way better now, but still need to make a load of changes, so much work still ahead of me!
Might still try to change it back a bit more to what I had before, will need some more experimenting!
Tips/trick and advice definitely more then welcome!
Cheers guys!
It feels like I am getting closer in terms of lighting, still not quite there yet tho!
To give you an idea of where I am going with this I added one of my references.
Looking at this I need to darken the color of the leaves a great bit, and balance the SSS a bit.
The thing I will be focusing on next is to add more color variation, add a proper ground texture and fill the ground with a bit more ground foliage as well.
Comments/Critique is more then welcome as always!
I did an update on this as well, some initial work on all the textures, Using Substance painter and baked all my textures out and then made some use of the filters to make them pop a bit more.
I am really happy on what I did in terms of having AO and some nice small shadows on the smaller foliage.
I do need to get some more variation in this still, gonna work on these things next.
Thanks for the comments!
Its been a bit since my last update but I spent some time updating my site and updating this scene as well.
Doing some test on different light angles.
I'm kind of in favor for the first angle as I think it has a nice contrast between dark and light elements.
But please do share your thoughts on it as well.
Some smaller bits left to do but I am getting closer to the end of the project.
I'm gonna look at some vertex painted moss to cover bits of the bark on the trees, look into tweaking the light angle as well as make different times of day as a final presentation.
Let me know what you think,
Cheers guys!
I personally like the colors the way they are now, but still! I will try it out because maybe I am getting blind from looking at it too much.
Cheers for the feedback!
The addition of the flowers with contrasting colors could really help this scene much, so you are absolutely right there, I'll see what I can do.
As well as adjust the shape of the pond and maybe adjust the scene accordingly.
Maybe adding a little stream going through the scene could be nice, so I will definitely look into that, cheers!
To be honest didn't give the contrasting colors a try because I like the piece like this, but still, the feedback was so well deserved.
What could help this scene is making some kind of structure of ruin thing but I am not going to add that for now, might revisit this in the future.
My main goal is achieved tho,
I expanded my foliage asset library a lot and got to know the workflow of speedtree and how to handle it more properly. I feel that I am decent enough with the program now to handle asset creation.
I might still need to work on creation of trees because this project didn't really address that in a real manner.
Thanks all for the super awesome feedback! And if you have anything else that could help me on my next endeavour let me know,
Cheers,
Luxap
I really liked working on this project!
And Thanks @Eric Chadwick for the frontpage! I really appreciate it!
Onto the next one!
Cheer guys!
Love your work. My critique would be to re-examine some of the foliage for stronger variation in color. I took a few photos off of my balcony this morning and you can see quite a bit of variation with dead or off color foliage. There seems to always be some sort of "dead" leaves even on a healthy plant or tree. Maybe adjusting the tree barks to all be a variation of brown but certainly different from one another.
On the video I would add some dust in the air, a few mosquitos buzzing by the camera and a blip or two of ripples in the water.
Will work on that later this week and post it here.
Took some time to balance tho but in essence it is really simple
Aaaawh thanks man!
Appreciate it
I did add some color variation to the leaves, but it might not be that apparent. I'll be sure to keep this in mind on the next foliage I do because you are absolutely correct and it would help the realism.
And I did add some fireflies in the evening video, but kept away from it in the day shot.
Thanks for taking to time for writing this awesome feedback!
Cheers man! Will try and take some time this week to do that.
Threw some stuff together and did a small lighting breakdown. This is not going to be that in depth tho, but if you have any questions, feel free to contact me personally via messages.
Lets start with the process first
Then all the things that make the lighting up and the settings I used. Remember these are personal and should be tweaked at your preference, there is no "right" lighting, so this setup might not work for your current scene.
Also keep in mind that I used a HDRI which I rendered to a Cubemap to use as a backplate as well using this technique here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIaYIuAEQuA
And some good HDRI maps can be found here:
http://hdrmaps.com/freebies?p=1
So! Lets start with the Directional Light
The thing I tweaked the most in this panel are the number of shadow cascades and the exponent and all the stuff attached to that. Because I wanted to get some really nice and crisp shadows.
I use Temperature because I like to use it, but there is no special reason for that, and ass you can see my scene uses Dynamic lighting, so Dynamic Inderect lighting is turned on as well as this affects the Light Propogation Volumes. Which can be activated using the link below:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/LightPropagationVolumes/
Next up the skylight
You can see that I used a Cubemap to drive this, and that is why the value is super low, because if you put this to high the scene would be overblown with light.
Then the fog
The settings I used below show a quite visible fog. But these settings can all be tweaked to your liking!
The godray material
I used this tutorial for the godray material and then slightly adjusted it so I had some transitions from more visible to less visible using a simple sine node seen at the bottom of the material.
And then lastly the post process volume.
The most important things here are the AO and the AA filtering, balancing the AO was both challenging and fun, because I wanted some nice depth but didnt want to make it too obvious. And then changing the AA to Temporal AA for some more smooth alpha maps and and overall smoother piece.
Also a thing to not it to lock the Auto Exposure to a certain value because else you will be constantly readjusting the values in the post process volume.
Hope you guys enjoy this mini breakdown. And don't hesitate to ask me some questions if you have some
Cheers,
Luxap
Keep up the good work!
Thanks man, I used them quite a bit for reference on the ferns, but still replicating those real life scanned materials is a pain! But I'm quite happy with the end result, thanks for the feedback!
Really appreciate the feedback man! It did help out a lot!
Thanks!
Thanks!
Btw,
As an update to this, I just put this project on gumroad so you can find out some things that I did on this and maybe support me a bit as well, but thats totally up to you.
Follow this link to the project!
*EDIT* Gumroad taken down because you cannot redistribute Speedtree asetts.
Thanks so much for all your support guys, really means a lot to me!
Cheers,
Luxap