The Wild West - Punto Muerto Valley (WIP) (Unreal 4)
polycounter lvl 9
The Wild West - Punto Muerto Valley (WIP)
Howdy y'all! I come with you today a project that I just started. Originally I had no plan in creating a wild west-like rocky valley as I was practicing creating modular rocks but later I went overboard and decorated the whole scene with just that one rock mesh. After 2 days of fiddling, I decided I should see it to the end and hear out some feedback from the community. It's something I definitely feel excited to wake up in the morning to and work on.
I started studying references after I set them in stone (pun intended? yes!), how vegetation and rocks blend together, sometimes there are bushes or bits of grass stemming from the cracks or corners. Also checking on the tinier rocks that seems to be more edgy and varied in sizes.
Basic Reference:
Unreal 4 :
I implemented the dynamic lighting and also global illumination, so whenever I move my directional light, it will still light it really nicely. If the rocks look too samey, the idea I have is to add some decals later on to give them weathering and variance.
For now it's just a natural scene but I plan to add some elements to it to tell a bit of a story. A camp area that's got ransacked or jumped by bandits and such.
Not the best rock but it could be easily improved. I should have decimated my zbrush sculpt to get more of the details baked in since my computer wasn't able to export 10.1 million polys.
Many things still needed to be added -
- More vegetation (minor and subtle)
- More smaller rocks for the ground area)
- More nature stuff (bird's nests and stacks of leaves)
- Definitely more props like camp fires and guns and blood and dynamite.
- More textures for the terrain to paint on.
- Backdrop/Background
Feedback on additions or changes to the scene are welcome as always.
(If my Spanish is right, Punto Muerto means stand-off.)
Howdy y'all! I come with you today a project that I just started. Originally I had no plan in creating a wild west-like rocky valley as I was practicing creating modular rocks but later I went overboard and decorated the whole scene with just that one rock mesh. After 2 days of fiddling, I decided I should see it to the end and hear out some feedback from the community. It's something I definitely feel excited to wake up in the morning to and work on.
I started studying references after I set them in stone (pun intended? yes!), how vegetation and rocks blend together, sometimes there are bushes or bits of grass stemming from the cracks or corners. Also checking on the tinier rocks that seems to be more edgy and varied in sizes.
Basic Reference:
Unreal 4 :
I implemented the dynamic lighting and also global illumination, so whenever I move my directional light, it will still light it really nicely. If the rocks look too samey, the idea I have is to add some decals later on to give them weathering and variance.
For now it's just a natural scene but I plan to add some elements to it to tell a bit of a story. A camp area that's got ransacked or jumped by bandits and such.
Not the best rock but it could be easily improved. I should have decimated my zbrush sculpt to get more of the details baked in since my computer wasn't able to export 10.1 million polys.
Many things still needed to be added -
- More vegetation (minor and subtle)
- More smaller rocks for the ground area)
- More nature stuff (bird's nests and stacks of leaves)
- Definitely more props like camp fires and guns and blood and dynamite.
- More textures for the terrain to paint on.
- Backdrop/Background
Feedback on additions or changes to the scene are welcome as always.
(If my Spanish is right, Punto Muerto means stand-off.)
Replies
I also like the new chunkier rock mesh you're using, but I think it looks a little strange to have them kind of coming to points at the top. In your references, the shapes are a lot more flat or angular at the top, not pointed.
I was trying to figure out why the scene still looked off and you've pointed it out well, you reckon i should create another flatter rock mesh to cap off thd tops?
@Chicken Dip: Yea, good idea, I should set up a tileable texture to the material.
Looking great btw, one suggestion would maybe to add a gradiant that's mapped to the world coordinates so everything fades as it gets higher.
[ame]
A nice quick pipeline to pumping out some rock assets this guy does, rock assets were always my weakest point, hence I wanted to find out more about other peoples techniques.
I didn't know you can do that with the gradient thing, do you know how I could go about setting that up in Unreal?
neato!
I thought of having this area as a mine shaft. The rock around it will be improved upon as it doesn't look like a mine shaft at the moment. I want to incorporate a story where these guys found some sort of rare earth element and this whole valley was attacked by a rival faction wanting that rare element, so the area will show an aftermath of the fight between the two. This rare element could also affect the environment surrounding it, like creating a blight patch or making everything dead around it.
That's starting to sound Assassin's Creed-ish it seems lol. Precursor sites in the Wild West and cowboy Assassins seems far-fetched.
I've put focus on working around the mine area. Instead of it being some generic mine, I want to make it look like something unnatural was unearthed and caused a stir. I've been working on textures for the assets, applying PBR to them, though they still need more tweaking.
I'm going to add more 3D modelled vegetation like trees and cactus bush as the level feels too basic with the cactus and bushes but on top of that I'm going to add new assets to make the level a little more interesting. My plan for the carts is to have those unnatural elements leaking out of them, with this weird looking glow and it slowly taints the land around it.
Oh yea, the cave has this eerie brrrr-like sound effect to it, so the video's gonna be great at the end of all this!
Ambient Occlusion in UE4 already affects specular properties. That's not to say you couldn't still do it. It'd just be pushing the boundaries of whats realistic and correct. You'd also probably not want to do it only in the spec, but roughness as well.
@Ged : This could be due to both global illumination and the material multiplier redness, though GI could be red due to the texture itself, which can be fixed easily as their original textures are brown. I plan to swap out the grass soon, the current one is actually an import from another project and it was for a warcraft-style map. I've used it for now as placeholders so I'll definitely change them, it should improve the look of the overall map.
@tomenjerry : I've made specular set at 0 for now. I might head into Substance Designer and make roughness maps for the rocks to add a touch of PBR to them.
The next thing I'll look at is vertex painting different textures onto the rocks as they seem plain right now.
TL:DR Section , skip if you can't be arsed reading.
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Three friends set out to get rich in the mining business. They wanted to be secretive about their operations to avoid competition. One of the friends, the prospector, finds this secluded area where it contained ore unlike any other.
Unfortunately for these chaps, they've dug too deep, causing a stir to some unknown entity buried within the confines of the valley. Sorta like an old western version of John Carpenter's The Thing, some weird shit is happening in the mine and one by one these poor chaps die. This weird entity could affect the men like The Thing.
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I want to drop in some subtle hints as to what happened in the aftermath of all of this.
Now why's there two crosses here? Hmmm, I wonder. The last surviving member could have gotten away in time, or possibly lying dead somewhere else.
I've started working on making a secluded camp area. The camp is going to have 3 bedrolls and some basic equipment they used to mine and stuff. There'll also be some hints as to what happened there.
The possibilities are endless. Of course you don't have to use any of these ideas just throwing stuff out there.
A couple of those things would be good actually, though the others might not fit into the old western frontier era. These three guys have a small scale operation here since they're been all hush hush about it. I could make it look like there was a wooden shack built in progress since they were staying out there more than usual but stopped halfway due to this catastrophe.
Can't believe how my level's evolved from basic modular rock testing to a small mining area. Been rewatching lots of Clint Eastwood's westerns lately
Thanks for sharing, that's definitely something I was thinking about regarding the level's location! I remember playing in an area in Red Dead Redemption that had that sort of look and that was my inspiration. At the start, I wasn't really thinking of exactly what sort of area it was going to be as it was originally a modular rock test. There are definitely some parts where the rocks can be better but I'll move back to that soon.
I've made a little update video so that the level can be seen in motion along with the couple of sounds I have on the map.
[ame]