Really great work so far. My only issue is with your larger assets, they look scaled up rather than like physically larger rocks. The large edge highlights and bevels give it away, as well as the density of the details. Probably something you'll want to keep in mind. I'd suggest making smaller assets that you can reuse more to build large walls with, and use a nice tiling texture in there too.
Damn, I personally didn't think it was that bad. But I've been getting a lot of comments about the post. Maybe my monitors aren't calibrated correctly. No worries guys, I'll fix it!!!
Mr. Significant - I'll see if I can out something together that explains my workflow and thought process with this stuff.
Makikon - thanks for the feedback, I'll see what I can do to address it. I think something else that might be happening is that I'm transitioning from small, to medium, to large reads a little too fast.
great work dude, love those rock sculpts. My only feedback won't be about the actual work, but the presentation. In my opinion you over-used post process on this scene, like I need 3d glasses to look at it, if you see what I mean . I can get my eyes to focus on anything because everything is kinda blurred or bloomed.
Awesome work I agree with Orb (edit: and the other, I've just read all the com), do not abuse of post process, this is a bit hard to see your work behind all this, you know it's like when you go to an interview wearing a tuxedo, you don't need it and the guy in front of you will think that you have something to hide
Thanks so much for the feedback guys!! Since I apparently made everyone want to pull their eyes out, I pulled back on the post a bit and removed the chromatic aberration entirely. I guess I got carried away with a new feature :P I toned down the fog a bit too and brought some contrast back into the scene. Thanks for all the crit so far guys! I'll still be working on the scene for a bit. Going to try to create some more unique rock formations now that most of the modular pieces are good to go.
Orb - Glad you like it man!! I'm sure I used your brush in there somewhere
Nice. The latest improvements are much better.
Only thing I would say is that the fog/dust is making the rocks look quite green in places, would be good to keep more red tones in there.
StraightDraw84 - What kind of stuff would you like to see? Wireframes? ZBrush? Textures? Would be more then happy to put some stuff together. Mr Significant was asking about some things earlier, I just haven't had a chance to put anything together yet. Offhand, I have this image showing the different pieces I'm working with, maybe it helps, maybe not. The asset demonstration video shows how these work together.
You have some really beautiful work here! My one crit is that you have too many hard transitions from ground to rock, especially on the bigger more horizontal rocks. I would say make some sand decals to lay down and help that transition.
With the mounds, how do you make them blend with the rest of the terrain. It looked like there was a harsh edge in the demo video that could only be seen when in unlit mode. Do you just hide that area with other rocks and vegetation?
wester - Yep! Agreed!! That's definitely a way to fix that problem. I'm just so used to it not being a memory friendly solution, that I don't even consider it anymore. Although, it may be different now in UE4 with deferred decals.
StraightDraw84 - I use world machine only to generate the Erosion Mound modules. I haven't really gotten into creating a full landscape with it.
Hayden Zammit - I'm using vertex blending with textures tiled by world position. This way i know that the texture will always align properly when blending between different meshes. The seam that you saw was probably the result of strong AO or unbuilt lighting. Also, every now and then if the angle of light is too extreme between the two intersecting meshes it'll create somewhat of a seam. If that's the case, then yeah I'll just throw a few other meshes in there to help cover it up.
Here's the node setup for world position uvs:
Example of how the blending should look most of the time:
If you get a nice heightmap for the alpha on your lerp, that would improve the texture blending a lot I think. Very clever solution with World Position.
This thread has been a real joy to read through, I'm tossing around the idea of making my own asset pack for unreal marketplace too. Do you have any good resources for making advanced shaders in Unreal 4? I only have experience with UDK and things look pretty different.
Thanks Makkon! I actually do have a heightmap but for some reason on this material specifically it's been a little weird and not blending the way you'd expect it to blend. The cracked mud and other gravel work perfectly. I'll have to take some time to figure out the problem. As far as shaders in UE4, it's surprisingly intuitive if you're coming from UDK. The nodes just look different. Looks like they're just trying to unify the interface between materials and blue prints. There are a few things that are different, but nothing so much that you wouldn't know what you were doing. Also, I hear that there's a way to bring back the classic material editor.
I really love how you blend those two meshes together perfectly with shader magic. I wish I understood how you did it! That's a tutorial worth paying for.
narticus - Is there anything specific you'd like to see about the materials? I can post up the master shader I made but it's pretty basic. Not sure if anyone would really learn anything from it. IMO it's kinda sloppy too....
synergy11 - You're actually not the first to say that. More than a handful of people have mentioned the stylized nature of these rocks. It definitely wasn't a conscious decision, rather a result of my personal style. I'm so used to simplifying things to their basic forms and using large planar shapes. But I think you nailed it on your feedback. In order to push this to feel much more realistic I think it would need those details. Great ref also. I'll have to give that a try moving forward. Unfortunately it won't be for this set, but since I'm doing rocks so often, this is feedback I'll definitely keep in mind.
As far as that blending goes, it's pretty much just that node setup I showed. You just plug that into the UV slot of your blending texture (in this case it's the gravel). From there you LERP your base texture with your blend texture by vertex color. So long as the value you're tiling your texture is consistent between your material instances, things should line up. It's not perfect though, sometimes there is a lighting seam. But I feel like those kinds of things are just unavoidable sometimes. Hopefully this helps. It's a lot more simple then it sounds. If I have some time tonight I can go a little deeper and visually show how it all works. Thanks again for the feedback dude!
Environment is looking cool but you still have the issue of your large rock formations looking like small rocks just scaled up.
The reason you are getting this odd look is that you have 2 different style rocks. You have large vertical rocks and medium sized horizontal rocks. Rocks and cliffs generally have one type of directionality and flow of how they break.
Cliffs and rocks will break horizontally and vertically, but rock formations will be dominated by one look or the other, with supporting breaks in the other direction. You need to choose what your dominate style of break will be and continue that throughout all your rocks. Unfortunately most people dont do this and just make rock blobs.
Here are two examples of this...
These cliffs are predominantly horizontal breaks, but that isnt to say they dont have some vertical cracks in there. This also helps sell the scale of how massive the vertical breaks are by how small the horizontal ones are.
These cliffs are predominately vertical breaks, but once again you can see cracks and fissures running vertically through things.
So to make good looking cliffs that are believable and transition from large to medium to small you must establish what your predominate style of cliff breaks will be. If the large and medium forms are competing against each other it wont appear that the smaller is just a smaller chunk of the large rock. Giving an odd disconnect from the two and throwing there scale off.
For your large cliff rocks if you want to continue the look of the mediums styles horizontal look you should add more horizontal cracks into the large cliffs. You will want to do these smaller than they are on the medium sized rocks as it will help fake the illusion of how big your cliffs are. You will assume that the size of the horizontal cracks in the large cliffs are the same size as the horizontal cracks as the medium ones. Which are close to the ground with smaller props that help anchor them and give relative scale.
Autocon - Awesome feedback man! Definitely something i need to work on is getting the actual likeness of rock formations. That makes total sense about the dominate style of cliff breaks. I'll give that a go on my next rock set. Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it
Hey buddy. I just started learning shaders in ue4, can you show your grass shader? What is in it? I made one shader but its pretty basic, and I cant get even decent look of grass.
Replies
A+ mate.
Do you have on tileable texture on all those stones ? Or they have unique normals and difffuse each stone ?
Can you show how this works for you ?
Anyway, isn't that too much filters for a one scene
Mr. Significant - I'll see if I can out something together that explains my workflow and thought process with this stuff.
Makikon - thanks for the feedback, I'll see what I can do to address it. I think something else that might be happening is that I'm transitioning from small, to medium, to large reads a little too fast.
Orb - Glad you like it man!! I'm sure I used your brush in there somewhere
Only thing I would say is that the fog/dust is making the rocks look quite green in places, would be good to keep more red tones in there.
Updated the first post with recent screenshots and a video fly through. Also here's a video demonstrating how I'm using the assets.
StraightDraw84 - What kind of stuff would you like to see? Wireframes? ZBrush? Textures? Would be more then happy to put some stuff together. Mr Significant was asking about some things earlier, I just haven't had a chance to put anything together yet. Offhand, I have this image showing the different pieces I'm working with, maybe it helps, maybe not. The asset demonstration video shows how these work together.
With the mounds, how do you make them blend with the rest of the terrain. It looked like there was a harsh edge in the demo video that could only be seen when in unlit mode. Do you just hide that area with other rocks and vegetation?
StraightDraw84 - I use world machine only to generate the Erosion Mound modules. I haven't really gotten into creating a full landscape with it.
Hayden Zammit - I'm using vertex blending with textures tiled by world position. This way i know that the texture will always align properly when blending between different meshes. The seam that you saw was probably the result of strong AO or unbuilt lighting. Also, every now and then if the angle of light is too extreme between the two intersecting meshes it'll create somewhat of a seam. If that's the case, then yeah I'll just throw a few other meshes in there to help cover it up.
Here's the node setup for world position uvs:
Example of how the blending should look most of the time:
This thread has been a real joy to read through, I'm tossing around the idea of making my own asset pack for unreal marketplace too. Do you have any good resources for making advanced shaders in Unreal 4? I only have experience with UDK and things look pretty different.
My only crit is the large rocks look a bit too "slabby" Not sure if you are going for more stylized or realistic.
But adding some more medium frequency details to add a little break up on the large slabs would really push this to the next level IMO.
Examples
http://www.nhptv.org/wild/images/greatbasindesert.jpg
http://stockarch.com/files/12/07/arid_desert_landscape.jpg
http://images.boomsbeat.com/data/images/full/24828/16-jpg.jpg
I really love how you blend those two meshes together perfectly with shader magic. I wish I understood how you did it! That's a tutorial worth paying for.
Cheers.
narticus - Is there anything specific you'd like to see about the materials? I can post up the master shader I made but it's pretty basic. Not sure if anyone would really learn anything from it. IMO it's kinda sloppy too....
synergy11 - You're actually not the first to say that. More than a handful of people have mentioned the stylized nature of these rocks. It definitely wasn't a conscious decision, rather a result of my personal style. I'm so used to simplifying things to their basic forms and using large planar shapes. But I think you nailed it on your feedback. In order to push this to feel much more realistic I think it would need those details. Great ref also. I'll have to give that a try moving forward. Unfortunately it won't be for this set, but since I'm doing rocks so often, this is feedback I'll definitely keep in mind.
As far as that blending goes, it's pretty much just that node setup I showed. You just plug that into the UV slot of your blending texture (in this case it's the gravel). From there you LERP your base texture with your blend texture by vertex color. So long as the value you're tiling your texture is consistent between your material instances, things should line up. It's not perfect though, sometimes there is a lighting seam. But I feel like those kinds of things are just unavoidable sometimes. Hopefully this helps. It's a lot more simple then it sounds. If I have some time tonight I can go a little deeper and visually show how it all works. Thanks again for the feedback dude!
The reason you are getting this odd look is that you have 2 different style rocks. You have large vertical rocks and medium sized horizontal rocks. Rocks and cliffs generally have one type of directionality and flow of how they break.
Cliffs and rocks will break horizontally and vertically, but rock formations will be dominated by one look or the other, with supporting breaks in the other direction. You need to choose what your dominate style of break will be and continue that throughout all your rocks. Unfortunately most people dont do this and just make rock blobs.
Here are two examples of this...
These cliffs are predominantly horizontal breaks, but that isnt to say they dont have some vertical cracks in there. This also helps sell the scale of how massive the vertical breaks are by how small the horizontal ones are.
These cliffs are predominately vertical breaks, but once again you can see cracks and fissures running vertically through things.
So to make good looking cliffs that are believable and transition from large to medium to small you must establish what your predominate style of cliff breaks will be. If the large and medium forms are competing against each other it wont appear that the smaller is just a smaller chunk of the large rock. Giving an odd disconnect from the two and throwing there scale off.
For your large cliff rocks if you want to continue the look of the mediums styles horizontal look you should add more horizontal cracks into the large cliffs. You will want to do these smaller than they are on the medium sized rocks as it will help fake the illusion of how big your cliffs are. You will assume that the size of the horizontal cracks in the large cliffs are the same size as the horizontal cracks as the medium ones. Which are close to the ground with smaller props that help anchor them and give relative scale.
ToffeeApple - Thanks!!
http://www.oliverm-h.blogspot.com/2014/08/ue3ue4-landscape-grass-blending.html
Thanks, lad.
I want to try this stuff out myself, actually.