Yeah some foliage with some red components would really help, I'll do some resarch on that and see if I find something I like
Yes some variation is still needed, I'm struggling a little to get it right at the moment since 4.7 the foliage is considered to be one actor and therefore have only one position so tinting it per instance is a no go, I have added a top projected color pattern but I'm not really getting the results I want with it yet, will keep working on that
Yeah I think I'm going to add some flatter areas in detail with som vertexpaint, should be pretty easy to setup in my current cliff shader!
Here are some updates as well, I realized most of my texture values where quite off when it comes to pbr so I cloned up the map and re-worked it a little so its more correct, mostly base color brightness and specular tweaks.
I think it got a bit better results when it comes to the lighting of the scene.
I get some of those annoying shadow cascade artifacts at some places, I can fix them but then I loose all my shadows in the distance making the whole world fall flat instead
This is looking awesome! Your assets and scene are great man, but there is a lot you could do to add drama, visual interest, artistic flair...'wow factor', y'know?
ideas;
Wish there was more clouds in the sky
Wish there was more ambient life..dust motes, butterflies or dragonflies, stuff like that...
Fake light beams from the sky would add drama and guide the eye (Effects Cave has examples)
You added color variation to the trees but it's hard to notice? Especially for the farther away trees, I would try pushing it farther to breakup the colors/values.
The scale of your trees seems uniform...wish you could just grab a few and really push them bigger or smaller, just to add variation and break things up.
Your horizon in the background...it's fairly flat. You said you added fake mountains/cards back there? Could you use those to break up the horizon line, vertically?
Lighting; It's realistic but not so dramatic or focused. What about adding a fake rimlight to that left-of-center mountain or something?
Lighting; Pop out some edges, try to get variation to the lighting, do some soft bounce lights to the shadowed areas, etc...just to add drama and visual interest.
Personal nitpick, I find those blue flowers a bit too neon-blue, wish they were less saturated.
Another little idea, what about some small puddles in the foreground? just more simple ideas to break things up...
Also a little tidbit - I know someone just brought up the samey-ness of the rock scales. A friend tipped me off to Iwagumi - the art of aquarium rock & plant placement. There is natural, and then there is beautiful - and there is a difference. I found it was really insightful thing to study...
A lot of these are next up on my to-do list, I will take the first VFX pass this weekend. It will take me some time as I'm not an experienced VFX artist at all ^^
I will revisit the small rocks sculpt as well, they don't hold up at the moment, get some more shapes in there and maybe add some varieties and do a better placement to add more interest.
Yeah those flowers are NOT behaving correctly I will fix!
Not a lot of progress in this update, working with effects is really slow since don't have much experience in it.. but I'm sharing anyway ^^
I added some prototype mist and god rays ( all very WIP ) and tuned the lighting a little, places some point lights in some areas and so on.
I'm going to try to make on big final push soon once I have some spare time, I really need to finish this now since energy for this projects is dropping a bit and I'm having some other ideas and thinking of joining the latest contest ^^
Fantastic scene! You, Sir, are awesome! Could you please give any tips on creating a foliage shader like yours which is the best iv seen in ue4 so far;)
Looking really superb. Theres not much I can look at it and say other than it all looks great. My only real concern would be the clouds and lighting. It's not exactly super dramatic at the moment and I feel as if the color and lighting for the presentation of the scene as a whole could be pushed further. For example, the background from this scene in Princess Mononoke could be interesting route you could take:
You could make the lighting a bit more orange and vibrant, take down the sun a notch (in position), and create some clouds around as if its dawn and the sun is breaking through the clouds. Then you could make the fog a bit darker/little bit more blue, which would help out the color. All of this would look especially great at the scene you have at 0:38 seconds in the above video. Keep in mind it still looks great now - I just think you could push it just a little bit more to get very vibrant and dramatic!
And like Maydream3d said, can we get some tips on how you made your foliage shaders? They look fantastic!
Thanks for the feedback! I tried to implement some of it in the new movie
I'm actually pretty happy with this so I'm going to call it done for now and render out the final one with the correct splash screen and start take some screenshots!
Yes, I will make a breakdown of the scene and share some of the shader stuff as well
The main thing that just screams out to me to fix is the clumpy grass. I'm not at my PC now, by I could easily paint outlines in Photoshop around each separate mesh. The grass is the one thing killing the foreground for me. I shouldn't be able to pick out individual meshes: it should seem like a natural flow of growth.
Looking great dude. I hope I can have vegetation like this by in the next month or two
For your video, the ONLY thing I think you need to address is that the first 40 or so seconds aren't incredibly interesting.
When I say that, I don't mean it's bad, it looks great; however, the money shot, like the part where I went "holy shitttt" was around 50 seconds and that part when the camera first goes off the cliff. Consider pushing that 50 second mark to around 20 seconds into the video.
If you check youtube stats/website stats, it seems that a user usually spends between 0-30 seconds, with the numbers trailing off a lot by the 1+ minute mark. Since the money shot is so close to the 1 minute mark, you may be risking a decent number of viewers not seeing it because we all just want media NOWWWW.
Hope that made sense.
Still, loooks beautiful!
Edit: Same thing for the list of screens you posted. It sounds incredibly dumb, but the best best image shouldn't be at the bottom of the list, it should be the first image! I realize it's WIP and all but it's something to consider when you post this on the folio!
Yeah I does make sense! I was just trying to do a bit of build-up to to the actual "reveal" and time the soundtrack when it gets some extra depth to it. Maybe its not the best way of doing it since it might gamble a little on peoples attention span but I think I will leave it as it is for the time being Great point though!
Yeah I need to figure out the proper order to present these in so its interesting enough to look through
I bumped up one of the overview shots so its higher up for now
Yeah I does make sense! I was just trying to do a bit of build-up to to the actual "reveal" and time the soundtrack when it gets some extra depth to it. Maybe its not the best way of doing it since it might gamble a little on peoples attention span but I think I will leave it as it is for the time being Great point though!
Yep, no problem. I had a similar approach with my last environment with building up the viewer, but found that it was a bit better to just give the viewer what they wanted early on instead
Although, this scene is pretty impressive all around so I don't think you should have trouble holding attention for that long!
noob here. how did you manage to complete such a massive environment like this by yourself? did you make everything or did you use premade assets? also how long did this take?
Thanks all! I'm happy you like it! It Made my morning
I will start working on some breakdowns during the week!
Well its a lot of copy paste and utilizing Unreals vegetation painting tools to place all the foliage around the main area, modular cliffs so I could build larger cliff formations quickly which helped a lot during the whiteboxing.
I made all the assets in the scene
It took aprox 4 months working after work in the evenings and during weekends
It's awesome Fozwroth, congrats!! I'm eagerly awaiting those breakdowns. If you could post some wireframes of those trees and scene I think a lot of people would learn fom you
Hey there! So I finally got around to break some of the assets down
I tried to be as informative and light as possible, I hope someone finds it helpful at least If anything isn't clear,or just badly explained in my silly pictures, feel free to ask!
For those who were expecting high class sculpts and cool new ways of doing things are probably going to be a bit disappointed, its all pretty straight forward really
Anyway here it goes!
Some basic sculpts that were then combined with different maps, just using some simple lerps in a shader and vertex colors, nothing fancy.
And some of the vegetation highpoly meshes I used to get normal and diffuse maps from, the leaves are just modeled after images and then have a leaf texture applied that is then baked down onto the final texture.
I made use of Mayas paint effects tool to paint out the branches with my Wacom( no leaves just the branch) And then mapped some bark textures to them. The UVs from paint effects tool are really handy and perfectly lined out for you. Then I just placed some leaves or clusters/smaller branches of leaves to dress them.
Shader breakdown for grass, tree trunks and tree/ bush foliage as well as a texture setup walktrough. I made heavy use of material instances so I could tweak such things as Color, Normal-strength, Translucency and wind per asset type.
The foliage shaders use these settings in the root node:
Subsurface,Masked,Twosided Foliage and two-sided
I have an external multiplier hooked up to my SRT maps since I find it more efficient to be able to tweak those on the fly rather than redoing maps for separate assets or just to do general tweaking.
Cant find the words to express how grateful i am for this breakdown! cant wait to try ur techniques out! I got a question though. What about ur light setup? Is it all static lighting? Did u use skylight or some hdri?
Still i feel that it dosnt pop. something with the colors dosnt feel right
the models and the composition are nice but the colors are too uniform and feel kind of bland, its missing contrast in color and saturation which would really push that environment
In unreal 3 you could make nice color variation by using world offset (?) and a simple blurry color map, giving plants on varied places slightly another hue, making vegetation a lot more vivid, playing with LUTs and DOF could be nice too, but LUTs dont help if the base texture colors are the same
edit: did a quick try, one with a curve and gradient to get a brighter background, and one photoshop default LUT with a blue tone (no color variation for plants done tho)
This is fantastic work with a really comprehensive breakdown!
I have a few questions regarding how you did the smaller pine tree branches. It looks like you just placed a few of the smaller end branches on the ends of the larger branch, so is this the same way you would approach a fir tree too? Also when your creating the branches for baking, how do you balance the density of the leaves on the branches with the overall density of leaves for the whole tree?
Replies
Yeah some foliage with some red components would really help, I'll do some resarch on that and see if I find something I like
Yes some variation is still needed, I'm struggling a little to get it right at the moment since 4.7 the foliage is considered to be one actor and therefore have only one position so tinting it per instance is a no go, I have added a top projected color pattern but I'm not really getting the results I want with it yet, will keep working on that
Yeah I think I'm going to add some flatter areas in detail with som vertexpaint, should be pretty easy to setup in my current cliff shader!
Here are some updates as well, I realized most of my texture values where quite off when it comes to pbr so I cloned up the map and re-worked it a little so its more correct, mostly base color brightness and specular tweaks.
I think it got a bit better results when it comes to the lighting of the scene.
I get some of those annoying shadow cascade artifacts at some places, I can fix them but then I loose all my shadows in the distance making the whole world fall flat instead
ideas;
Also a little tidbit - I know someone just brought up the samey-ness of the rock scales. A friend tipped me off to Iwagumi - the art of aquarium rock & plant placement. There is natural, and then there is beautiful - and there is a difference. I found it was really insightful thing to study...
A lot of these are next up on my to-do list, I will take the first VFX pass this weekend. It will take me some time as I'm not an experienced VFX artist at all ^^
I will revisit the small rocks sculpt as well, they don't hold up at the moment, get some more shapes in there and maybe add some varieties and do a better placement to add more interest.
Yeah those flowers are NOT behaving correctly
Cool link, I'll give it a read
I added some prototype mist and god rays ( all very WIP ) and tuned the lighting a little, places some point lights in some areas and so on.
I'm going to try to make on big final push soon once I have some spare time, I really need to finish this now since energy for this projects is dropping a bit and I'm having some other ideas and thinking of joining the latest contest ^^
I started toying around with the idea of something red in the scene to break of all the green. Its very WIP but it might work.
Started adding some more clouds and some simple ambient effects( also very WIP )
Next up is to try to do some birds to give it some more life : ]
I'm having some issues with flickering shadows, anyone have any ideas? I'll look into it some more before making the final version
I will go and fix some of the backdrop placement so it looks a bit better as well
Hopefully I'll be done with this project by tomorrow which is pretty nice since I really feel like moving on to something else : ]
colors got a bit borked during compression but its not much that can be done about it
[ame="
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/33400000/mononoke-princess-mononoke-33435621-1530-800.jpg
You could make the lighting a bit more orange and vibrant, take down the sun a notch (in position), and create some clouds around as if its dawn and the sun is breaking through the clouds. Then you could make the fog a bit darker/little bit more blue, which would help out the color. All of this would look especially great at the scene you have at 0:38 seconds in the above video. Keep in mind it still looks great now - I just think you could push it just a little bit more to get very vibrant and dramatic!
And like Maydream3d said, can we get some tips on how you made your foliage shaders? They look fantastic!
Thanks for the feedback! I tried to implement some of it in the new movie
I'm actually pretty happy with this so I'm going to call it done for now and render out the final one with the correct splash screen and start take some screenshots!
Yes, I will make a breakdown of the scene and share some of the shader stuff as well
[ame="
You should do a 60 fps video, slow panning shots at 30 fps always look choppy to me
Time to kick back for a few days before its time for another adventure!
Yeah I can try rendering a 60 fps version too!
[ame="
For your video, the ONLY thing I think you need to address is that the first 40 or so seconds aren't incredibly interesting.
When I say that, I don't mean it's bad, it looks great; however, the money shot, like the part where I went "holy shitttt" was around 50 seconds and that part when the camera first goes off the cliff. Consider pushing that 50 second mark to around 20 seconds into the video.
If you check youtube stats/website stats, it seems that a user usually spends between 0-30 seconds, with the numbers trailing off a lot by the 1+ minute mark. Since the money shot is so close to the 1 minute mark, you may be risking a decent number of viewers not seeing it because we all just want media NOWWWW.
Hope that made sense.
Still, loooks beautiful!
Edit: Same thing for the list of screens you posted. It sounds incredibly dumb, but the best best image shouldn't be at the bottom of the list, it should be the first image! I realize it's WIP and all but it's something to consider when you post this on the folio!
Yeah I does make sense! I was just trying to do a bit of build-up to to the actual "reveal" and time the soundtrack when it gets some extra depth to it. Maybe its not the best way of doing it since it might gamble a little on peoples attention span but I think I will leave it as it is for the time being
Yeah I need to figure out the proper order to present these in so its interesting enough to look through
I bumped up one of the overview shots so its higher up for now
Yep, no problem. I had a similar approach with my last environment with building up the viewer, but found that it was a bit better to just give the viewer what they wanted early on instead
Although, this scene is pretty impressive all around so I don't think you should have trouble holding attention for that long!
Edit: Also, would love some breakdowns on this when you have the time
Those clouds really so much to it as well as the great lighting does!
Would you by any chance be willing to share your process for those needles in the foreground of the last shot? They look pretty mind blowing!
I will start working on some breakdowns during the week!
Well its a lot of copy paste and utilizing Unreals vegetation painting tools to place all the foliage around the main area, modular cliffs so I could build larger cliff formations quickly which helped a lot during the whiteboxing.
I made all the assets in the scene
It took aprox 4 months working after work in the evenings and during weekends
I tried to be as informative and light as possible, I hope someone finds it helpful at least
For those who were expecting high class sculpts and cool new ways of doing things are probably going to be a bit disappointed, its all pretty straight forward really
Anyway here it goes!
Some basic sculpts that were then combined with different maps, just using some simple lerps in a shader and vertex colors, nothing fancy.
And some of the vegetation highpoly meshes I used to get normal and diffuse maps from, the leaves are just modeled after images and then have a leaf texture applied that is then baked down onto the final texture.
I made use of Mayas paint effects tool to paint out the branches with my Wacom( no leaves just the branch) And then mapped some bark textures to them. The UVs from paint effects tool are really handy and perfectly lined out for you. Then I just placed some leaves or clusters/smaller branches of leaves to dress them.
The foliage shaders use these settings in the root node:
Subsurface,Masked,Twosided Foliage and two-sided
I have an external multiplier hooked up to my SRT maps since I find it more efficient to be able to tweak those on the fly rather than redoing maps for separate assets or just to do general tweaking.
http://www.gamestar.de/news/vermischtes/3082585/unreal_engine_4.html
Still i feel that it dosnt pop. something with the colors dosnt feel right
the models and the composition are nice but the colors are too uniform and feel kind of bland, its missing contrast in color and saturation which would really push that environment
In unreal 3 you could make nice color variation by using world offset (?) and a simple blurry color map, giving plants on varied places slightly another hue, making vegetation a lot more vivid, playing with LUTs and DOF could be nice too, but LUTs dont help if the base texture colors are the same
edit: did a quick try, one with a curve and gradient to get a brighter background, and one photoshop default LUT with a blue tone (no color variation for plants done tho)
so I assume this is supossed to be "lowpoly" asset for close up plant ?
btw congrats for the feature, pretty good looking, and I learned a lot, from your progress.
only crit probably the grass still seem too planar and repetitive,and low poly rock in close up area. but otherwise its a stellar works. !!
I have a few questions regarding how you did the smaller pine tree branches. It looks like you just placed a few of the smaller end branches on the ends of the larger branch, so is this the same way you would approach a fir tree too? Also when your creating the branches for baking, how do you balance the density of the leaves on the branches with the overall density of leaves for the whole tree?
Thanks again this is really inspiring stuff!
http://kotaku.com/move-over-far-cry-4-this-is-how-you-do-mountains-1683447219
edit: looks like I'm late on this. either way, congrats!