Diablo 3 - Angel Tree - UE4

Fozwroth

Hey!

I was doing a re-run of Diablo 3 maybe two weeks ago or so and wanted to build one of the trees that you can see in the heaven act.

I wanted to kind of do my own take on it in UE4, not necessarily follow the painterly style of the game(and I'm not a great painter)

I feel I'm closing in on the finish line for this little side project so I though I could reach out for some feedback There are some tweaks and fixes here and there I want to do and maybe add in some clouds around it but overall I think most of it is there..

I'm currently fighting with matinees to get my camera shots up and running for the final presentation, so any feedback in the meantime is much appreciated

Fozwroth

Bump : ]

Xazas

I like very much!

I feel the particles could be a bit brighter, just my oppinion.

djoexe

Really nice but you should try to add some SubSurface translucency to your foliage, it's gonna help a lot to give it more life.

Fozwroth

Thanks! Yeah I can probably brighten them up a bit!

There is some subsurface going on in there, I might need to take a look into the shader setup and see if I can improve upon it

JoshWilkinson

I loving the piece but I think the color scheme is too monochromatic for me. I see the orange colored sky complimenting the blue but the sky is currently reading like a default Unreal skybox; which bugs me.

I think it you kill the skybox but light it with some orange light (and with that SSS? that could look hella sexy) it might work a bit better. That said, the orange light, even if extremely subtle, may not help. I'm just kind of spit balling here. Maybe if the rocks or stone have some subtle orange in them? I made a stone texture with some warm tones in the texture a bit ago and was happy with the result. I dunno, just something warm the compliment all the cool.

urgaffel

Couple of things (bear in mind I have no idea what the D3 version looks like): it's very blue! Maybe some subtle variations in the leaves? They are nice leaves but the general impression is that they're all more or less the same colour (not necessarily a bad thing). The drops look like blue glowy droplets falling from the leaves, not sure if that's intentional or not. Floating specs seems more fitting for a "magic" tree. The grass is very even, maybe randomize the scale a bit more so you get a few larger tufts? Maybe make a second grass type with longer strands so you get a bit variety in there too, at the moment it looks like one grass tuft texture.

Fozwroth

Thanks for all the great feedback!

I have an orange main light in the scene but I might need to boost it up a litte I'm just worried about my bricks as they are picking up a lot of the lights color( they are actually greyish blue) but I'll tug a little with the sliders!

Yep its the default sky(shame) I'm just not that great at making skies and just having a flat color/gradient made it pretty booring in my opinion. I've been thinking of adding some nice clouds around the scene to help get rid of the default sky feeling and also sell the idea of it being high up in the sky more

Yeah I need to work some more with the rocks textures color variations

hehe yeah its very blue^^ I can link the ref I'm using later tonight, the actual tree is more pale and blueish white but I felt it made everything a bit dull since I dont have a proper environment around it to support it.

I need to work with the particles a little, its supposed to drop/ pollinate something! not exactly sure what since its only a few pixels in the game.

I'll play around with the grass settings a bit, right now its only one mesh as well. all of the stuff around the tree is more for presentation but I guess I need to push it further

urgaffel

I had a quick look at some lets play videos and it seems like the trees are standing in glowing blue healing waters and the particles are drops/dew falling into the "basin". There's also some faint glowy mist hovering around the base of the tree which you could add for added mysticism... Maybe make the water part a bit bigger? The trees in D3 are a lot more compact than yours so the relative size between the leafy bit and the basin is a bit closer to 1:1 in D3 compared to your version. And yes, definitely make your own background, even if it's a really simple one.

AlphaMix

What exactly was your approach to modelling this tree, did you make a ball of leaves by hand and then just duplicate it around? What about the thinner branches? Ty

Fozwroth

I high poly modeled some branches I wanted to use, one normal branch one of those hanging ones and one branch that is kind of how it would look straight on, kind of a "shield" mesh to point outwards and hide planes from showing too much Will post a breakdown once I'm finished

I started adressing some of the feedback I have received during the day, including whats been said here.

I started working on my own sky, will probably have to complement with some cloud meshes/particles to make it work.

I added some height variation to the grass for now, I also reduced the "pointy" parts on the top of the tree so now it has a little more weight to it. I decided to keep the water about the size I have, I tried different ones but I still felt this one was the better one

I tog another pass at the lighting and some color tweaks, added some variation to the branch texture but it might be to subtle.. And I punched up the SSS effect more.

I will try to do the whirling glowing effect tomorrow and maybe start experimenting with some clouds

here is the current progress and the ref I am using as inspiration:

Xazas

I like the improvements, eager to see what comes next!

RexM

Nice, I like it.

Might be nice to have intense lighting coming from the base of the tree like in D3 as well, creating intense shadowing on the canopy?

DireWolf

It looks really cool and misty from above. Awesome.

urgaffel

Aww, I was scrolling the thread up from the bottom and saw your reference first and thought it was your updated tree and got really excited. New wip looks good, here's a quick paintover (your whirling effect will hopefully look better than my version):



Changes:

Added misty stuff
Added faint light from misty stuff on the lower branches
Added a tiny bit more light in the shadowed areas on the stone steps under the tree to make it look like the light is bouncing around a bit more
Added more roots
Added more grass
Added glow (looks poo but could be done better in UE)
Added a bit of irregularity to the stones

Adel0n

This work is awesome! I very like it! I hope that you finish it.

Fozwroth

Thanks for the paintover

Yeah the swirling glow effect is next on my list!

I'll see if its possible to flare out the roots more without having to rework the tree too much.

Going to bring back some more of the bloom in the scene so stuff glows a little more as well.

Thanks, Yeah I'm going to finish this! pretty close to the finishline so it would be a shame to stop now ^^

Fozwroth

I made some more tweaks and added some kind of "thwirling mist" material ^^

Xazas

I love it! It would be great to have a gif or vid to see the thwirling mist in motion.

Zieg_Reborn

This is looking very good. I would almost suggest taking this further and trying to make a small forest night time scene with a bunch of these.

The glow and particles could really sell it. Great work so far.

Fozwroth

Thanks! Yeah I kind of want to do a larger environment with this! Would be sweet, but right now I want to finish some other projects as well, don't want this one to turn too big since I've already have a few large ones in progress.

But it's definitely something I would like to do later on

Here is a first mockup of the turntable video, nothing fancy just a simple camera and some tunes.


I'm going to take a final pass on this during this week and render out the final movie and images, also some breakdowns : ]


[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J34eyYWY64I"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J34eyYWY64I[/ame]

DWalker

The grass seems a bit 'clumpy' - I can't tell if it's from the placement of the clumps, or the geometry of the individual bits of grass.

Every bit of foliage looks to be an identical color. On trees, there is some variance - new leaves are brighter & less saturated, dead leaves (& leaves that have fallen) have lost their chlorophyll and resumed their base color - white, brown, red, etc. This is also true for grass - some stems will be dead or less saturated. You don't need to go crazy - just try adding a little bit of variance to a few leaves or stems. Take a look at the leaves from a weeping willow - a very similar tree to yours - and notice the yellow mixed in with the green, and note that the stems are yellow rather than green.


The trunk might look better in a subtle complimentary color, such as orange.

The stones of the planter look very regular. Offsetting alternate courses of stone by a half brick might improve the appearance. Adding some variance to the color of the stones might help as well.

The dripping particles feel to dense, more like a stream than anything else. Adding more emitters, but having them emit particles more randomly and less frequently might look better. Adding a very infrequent falling leaf particle might be nice. If you are going to keep the current stream, then you might consider adding small puddles of glowy blue stuff on the stone beneath a stream.

If the planter is old, then you might want to deform the shape a bit to indicate roots growing under the stones and shifting them as the roots grow.

Fozwroth

Thanks for the awesome and detailed feedback!

I'll take a pass att the grass again.

I kind of want to stick to the D3 reference for the colors but I see what you mean about the variation, there is some in there now but it gets a bit overpowered by the SSS and the Emissive - I could try to add some more of it to break it up a little.

I am terrible att making particle effects and controlling them ^^ I agree that they need to be offseted in the timing, now they are too regular I'll see what I can dig out from the interwebs!

I'll see if I can get som displacement in there to break up the stones and maybe even break it up a little like in your reference picture as well as adding some more color variations

Fozwroth

I'm calling this done for now, sorry for not applying all the great feedback to it, some of it was quite a hassle to fix so I'm saving that for another time : ]

I will probably expand upon this piece later, making a full environment out of it

I will be posting some breakdowns tomorrow ^^ Hope you like it!

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mfiRLFz9O4"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mfiRLFz9O4[/ame]

Fozwroth

Here are the breakdowns if anyone would find it interesting : ]

Nothing fancy really

pinkbox

How do you go about the stones in the dirt texture?
How do you model it to be tilable and how do you do the diffuse?

Fozwroth

I basically used this workflow for the ground and then I used the layers inside Zbrush to draw the pepples in 2.5D mode

The diffuse I just threw in some colors and photos based on some masks I was able to get from the normalmap I produced from ZBrush


[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e04k4Cz8UBo"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e04k4Cz8UBo[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNgs2DcAsF4"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNgs2DcAsF4[/ame]

Fandor1n

Very sweet. Could you please explain how you make those tree branches? Very sharp and intence normal maps too.

LRoy

This looks sick. You did a great job

Fozwroth

Thanks! glad you like it!

I just modelled the leaves and branches in Maya and rendered out a normal, diffuse and AO from Xnormal.

I mapped a leaf image onto my mesh leaves(started with a simple plane) and followed the shape of the leaves with the mesh then gave it volume and made the creases in along the middle.

I used Maya pant effects do draw out the branches with some pressure sensitivity with my wacom and then converted them to polygons. Then I went in and placed my leaves along them and rotated them around.

I made one "flat" branch and one branch that is from the front that will kind of serve as a "shield" mesh that is facing outwards to hide some of the simpler planes, so its basically 2-3 planes that are intersecting and then the "shield" is placed almost like a lid, hiding the sharp flat angles of the planes

Hopefully that made some kind of sense

Fandor1n

Hm. Pretty simple - but looking great! Thank you, i'll try that approach

Fozwroth

Yeah, its pretty straight forward Thanks!