Shadows of the City Walls

NickGW

I've been working on this for two weeks now so I thought I'd get this thread up and running.

Progress has been going great when it comes to making the assets, however lighting this environment has proved difficult. The skylight is making the shadows on static meshes brighter but leaving the landscape shadows dark still. In some cases the shadows are almost completely black until you get close. I've tried toying around with the post processing and a LUT some to compensate but it doesn't have much of an effect without ruining other parts of the scene. If anyone has any tips or thoughts on what might alleviate the harsh shadowing that would be extremely helpful. There's also the mip mapping on the banner and some of the lightmaps which isn't helping either. Don't even get me started on those gross trees in the background.

As for where things will go from here, I'm working on finishing up the foliage with another pass before working on a few small structures and wood fence to build on the vineyard/countryside thing I have going. I'm also going to do another pass at set dressing with foliage,rocks because they feel messy and haphazard in spots.

That's it for now!

The concept I started with from Assassins Creed 2.

JustMeSR

Nice (particuralry the gate). I am not sure about the snowy mountains though. They seem close and out of place. You could do something closer to the reference.

I am not sure about the filter too, green from the concept seems more appropriate than dark/ night blue.

Other than that I am fan of the lighting you got going on there.:poly121:

DanielR17

Hey!
Just to be sure, are you using Unreal Engine?
You did a good job in two weeks but I'm not sure wether it's a good thing to rely on a post process volume for now. What is your lighting setup exactly?

NickGW

@JustMeSR Yeah your right about the mountains. I've played with pushing them back further/shrinking them but I should just go with rockier bigger hills in the distance. I'll play with the LUT some more to bring in more green too and post an updated screenshot later tonight.

@DanielR17 Yeah I'm using UE4 version 4.6. I'm using a directional light and skylight combo. Directional light is set to stationary and the skylight is set to movable. I can post a screen grab of the specific settings later tonight.

I normally don't like to rely on post processing for much more than subtle color changes but the scene didn't feel right till I started really pushing it.

thanks for the quick feedback!

Joost

Looking good! The pine trees could use more of a silhouette. And the scale of the bricks is too big imo. Makes the castle look tiny and messes with the scale of the scene.


Your grass also looks a bit flat. Try adding a vertical gradient that gets darker towards the bottom.

And maybe try adding some more low lying fog?

NickGW

@Joost By pine trees do you mean the thin tall ones in the front of the first screenshot? They do need more branches around the sides and I should probably approach them similarly to how Jonas Axelsson did in this environment. As it is I used a tiling texture for the bulk of the body and smaller branches with transparency around the sides but with the tiling part in the center feels too solid. I'll give that tree another pass along with the one in the background

Thanks for the feedback!

NickGW

Made a few adjustments including bringing in more green to the scene overall, adjusting the tiling on the brick wall to shrink the brick size down, creating a subtle fog particle system for the foreground, and turned off texture streaming to alleviate the mipmap issue temporarily. I also created a hill set in worldmachine. Just need to bake/texture and retopo before I can show those off.

I increased the cascading dynamic shadow map distance to help with the flatness of the foliage. I still don't have a good solution for adjusting the normals in Modo 701 to get proper foliage shading so until then this is the best I can do. I toyed around with the 4.7 preview build and I should be able to get way better results without changing the mesh normals but I'd have to recreate the entire scene to do so. If I can't find a good solution I may just end up doing that to get the best results.

That's it for now.

Here's a screengrab of my lighting settings. The last part of the image is the world settings.