Foliage and environment in cryengine.
polycounter lvl 14
Now when ue4 is the hot shit I find it appropriate to learn cryengine. Like my pa used to say, always one step behind.
Either way, I am trying to experiment with proper foliage and environment making and it feels appropriate to do it in cryengine since the setup for making good foliage is more straightforward there.
Here is the piece of land that I am working on.
This is where I am at now. I am decently happy with a lot of stuff,but I think I am approaching the threshold for what I can accomplish without input from someone older and wiser. I seem to be pushing things backwards and forwards but I am not sure if it is getting better or not.
All foliage is done through baking from high poly meshes that are modelled from reference I found, or in some cases I actually filled my scanner with grass and modeled on that.
On the technical side of things I think I might have prioritized polycount vs overdraw one too many times, I will sort that out to the extent I can and hopefully I will not have to rebake it all.
I will try and mess around to get better looking stuff while still deleting polys and cutting overdraw but for now, I have wanted to flesh out the scene more first.
Creatively I have a few Ideas on where to go, but really, I take all input I can on this. The end game for the foliage is to have assets that can populate a very large area and hopefully not look too repeated. It is supposed to be reminiscent of the English countryside towards the coast but with hints at fantasy.
Thank you for taking the time, I'd be glad to hear your thoughts on it.
Either way, I am trying to experiment with proper foliage and environment making and it feels appropriate to do it in cryengine since the setup for making good foliage is more straightforward there.
Here is the piece of land that I am working on.
This is where I am at now. I am decently happy with a lot of stuff,but I think I am approaching the threshold for what I can accomplish without input from someone older and wiser. I seem to be pushing things backwards and forwards but I am not sure if it is getting better or not.
All foliage is done through baking from high poly meshes that are modelled from reference I found, or in some cases I actually filled my scanner with grass and modeled on that.
On the technical side of things I think I might have prioritized polycount vs overdraw one too many times, I will sort that out to the extent I can and hopefully I will not have to rebake it all.
I will try and mess around to get better looking stuff while still deleting polys and cutting overdraw but for now, I have wanted to flesh out the scene more first.
Creatively I have a few Ideas on where to go, but really, I take all input I can on this. The end game for the foliage is to have assets that can populate a very large area and hopefully not look too repeated. It is supposed to be reminiscent of the English countryside towards the coast but with hints at fantasy.
Thank you for taking the time, I'd be glad to hear your thoughts on it.
Replies
And now to foliage. They are very. .hmmm...strange. I dont know what zone you are living in and what are those foliage. I can only recognize grass.
First on the lef. I dont know what reference you had. Its just cant be right on this planet.
Second, its even. Even in spaces beetween leafs. It cant be just like that.
Then you want color variation on those foliage. The grass is only one color, and have zero AO on it.
The colors of the foliage overall is washed out. You can choose beetwen two tones: vibrant, saturated colors or real world pallete, like it looks in real world. Here you have something really beetwen, washed out of real colors.
Dont put black gradient on top of foliage. Its not looking good.
Rocks are cool. Maybe not enough defined edges on it.
Sorry for what I've wrote here, but its late, and Im trying to make next gen apporach to vegetation system, same on Cryengine
The far left one is a bit weird but it is only a filler like twig center to break uo a flat silhouette in certain edges, I use it on a concave mesh to fill out flat looking silhouettes.
This is however, just a first pass to get everything in engine and I will do this pretty in iterations. I am keeping the bulk of the work in the high poly so it is pretty simple to re-bake it. I will rectify a lot of stuff that I have overlooked in the baking process.
In the meantime, I made a rainbow.
Just playing around, I'll get more serious about this soon.
Still doodling around in the level editor to sort of feel around and figure out where to work to lift this thing. First of all I think I should bang up the bushes some so they are not so uniform. Then I have some tweaking to do, the sharp rush and barley just don't cut it, maybe I will remake them into better sharp rush and barley or just cut them out, then I need more diversity in the mix, I will make one red variant of the same flower and then a white variant. Maybe I'll make a tree too. I don't like trees, but I am starting to get the feeling that it is a bit of a pointless endeavor to populate huge natural areas without trees.
Also, I will begin making my own textures for the ground, this is just literally copypastes from cgtextures and some quick ndo2 magic.
If the ground textures look better maybe I will be less reliant on fill up the ground with a bajillion polygons.
I am right with you, at that one step behind.
And UE 4 is rockin' there, with more and more users.
Gawd bl