Dune Desert Project [UE4]
polycounter lvl 8
Hey there Community,
my name is George and I am the Lead Designer of our Project (there is no title yet). The game is going to be a Third Person Shooter with Role-playing Elements and other interesting mechanics/gameplay features that I cannot mention yet. About the art-style/graphics level, we are aiming for realism...
The Project is being developed in the Unreal Engine 4 (the screenshots below are made in 4.16.2)
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So, recently I have been working on the Terrain/Landscape of our Game. The elevation/heightmap is quite ready but the material is giving me a lot of headaches.
First of all let me fill you in about some of the settings.
• There is a Day-Night Cycle
• There is no static/baked lighting, everything is dynamic
• I haven't enabled/disabled any options from the Project Settings
• Picture #3, as you can see, is showing 2 issues. 1) Spiky terrain, 2) Texture cut/glitch or whatever it is called
About the material
• I'm using distance blend for near and far (both for Albedo and Normal)
• For now there is only a single Albedo texture (of sand), the detail has been added with 2-3 Normal Maps scattered around with the help of splat/noise masks (grayscale textures inside RGB). I will try to add even more
• For the Dunes I've implemented a slope function that eliminated the normal map details if it's too steep
• With the help of Vertex Painting Layers, I will add later on more Albedo textures (small rocks/pebbles, dry mud etc)
• One normal map below is using Parallax Occlusion Mapping (might switch to Tessellation, but the FPS are below 10)
I've been throwing some glances on the Sinai Desert Level of Battlefield 1 for some ideas and technical references, but I do still believe that something's missing.
Future addition:
• I do want to add blowing dust on the terrain's material, but I don't seem to get it to work properly
• Dust particles, sandstorms and more particle related effects
• Some kind of mirage effect in the distance. I have absolutely no idea how this is going to be made :P
Picture #1:
Picture #2:
Picture #3:
We do really need all the feedback, suggestions, technical advice etc that we can get. We are not professionals and we would really REALLY appreciate it.
Thank you a lot for your time
my name is George and I am the Lead Designer of our Project (there is no title yet). The game is going to be a Third Person Shooter with Role-playing Elements and other interesting mechanics/gameplay features that I cannot mention yet. About the art-style/graphics level, we are aiming for realism...
The Project is being developed in the Unreal Engine 4 (the screenshots below are made in 4.16.2)
-----
So, recently I have been working on the Terrain/Landscape of our Game. The elevation/heightmap is quite ready but the material is giving me a lot of headaches.
First of all let me fill you in about some of the settings.
• There is a Day-Night Cycle
• There is no static/baked lighting, everything is dynamic
• I haven't enabled/disabled any options from the Project Settings
• Picture #3, as you can see, is showing 2 issues. 1) Spiky terrain, 2) Texture cut/glitch or whatever it is called
About the material
• I'm using distance blend for near and far (both for Albedo and Normal)
• For now there is only a single Albedo texture (of sand), the detail has been added with 2-3 Normal Maps scattered around with the help of splat/noise masks (grayscale textures inside RGB). I will try to add even more
• For the Dunes I've implemented a slope function that eliminated the normal map details if it's too steep
• With the help of Vertex Painting Layers, I will add later on more Albedo textures (small rocks/pebbles, dry mud etc)
• One normal map below is using Parallax Occlusion Mapping (might switch to Tessellation, but the FPS are below 10)
I've been throwing some glances on the Sinai Desert Level of Battlefield 1 for some ideas and technical references, but I do still believe that something's missing.
Future addition:
• I do want to add blowing dust on the terrain's material, but I don't seem to get it to work properly
• Dust particles, sandstorms and more particle related effects
• Some kind of mirage effect in the distance. I have absolutely no idea how this is going to be made :P
Picture #1:
Picture #2:
Picture #3:
We do really need all the feedback, suggestions, technical advice etc that we can get. We are not professionals and we would really REALLY appreciate it.
Thank you a lot for your time
Replies
Keep in mind I'm hobbyist as well.
For sand blowing I used spline tool in my environment so that it's easier to control when the effect appears. In here with open environment it would propably be best to put it directly in landscape material.
I do not recommend using POM for landscapes, since the effect is really expensive and after some testing in the past I haven't been able to make it inactive over the distance. In all cases tesselation gave way better results than parallax.
For mirage effect I would recommend creating some big plane that you will put in the distance with refraction material.
If you want to put it everywhere and in playable areas as well, then you can try fading it over camera distance.
Sand dune shapes look really nice in second picture, but they look a bit off in first and especially third image.
I would recommend either figuring out the shapes in WM, or easier way- sculpt it in some software, or use combination of both.
The sky looks really good.
Ok I hope it helps a little bit, you seem to know what you are doing, keep it up.
1. You need to create better dunes. Gather some references. I know it's hard to create nice dunes, lots of them. But that's the most important thing you should do right atm. There are tutorials on youtube showing you how to do it.
2. Sand normal maps aren't natural. Looks like as if you've used the ones from Substance Share. Especially in the third picture you can see how bad the tiling is.
3. Look at some refs for lighting. You usually don't see that kind of fog in such deserts at all.
4. Deserts don't have clouds on them. UDS doesn't look realistic by itself, looks very flat so if you're aiming for realism you should probably drop that and create a better sky.
5. Drop POM. That's a massive performance hit. Using distance based tessellation is a better option. But generally speaking you can't have good performance on a nice looking landscape due to the absence of texture arrays, dynamic branching and such other features. Every new landscape layer hits performance really bad.
6. Apply some macro color variation.
7. Apply some really subtle macro normal variation.
8. For mirage effect you should probably mask out the flat areas and modify the shader to make those parts reflect the sky, and should be distance based so you only get to see it in far distances.