UE4 Hand-Painted Environment: Temple on a Hill

mrgesy

Hey Polycount, I've been practicing on a handpainted environment in UE4. Been working on it for several days and would like some crits and direction. There's a lot of work but here's what I have so far.




**CONCEPT** (Mike Franchina)

linkov

this is Mike Franchina, Torchlight II concept art. http://aphinc.blogspot.ru/2012/09/and-god-said-let-there-be-torchlight.html

mrgesy

linkov said:

this is Mike Franchina, Torchlight II concept art. http://aphinc.blogspot.ru/2012/09/and-god-said-let-there-be-torchlight.html

Thanks! He has a lot of awesome concepts!

cesarinm7

awesome work dude. I like the hand painted textures, look clean and simple but very good. How did you do with the terrain/base mesh? can you post a wireframe render? how did you do to blend the texture for grass and road on the terrain?  congrats..

mrgesy

cesarinm7 said:

awesome work dude. I like the hand painted textures, look clean and simple but very good. How did you do with the terrain/base mesh? can you post a wireframe render? how did you do to blend the texture for grass and road on the terrain?  congrats..

Thanks!
I used UE4's landscape sculpting tools to sculpt the terrain and texture it. For the blending, I just used "height blend" as the blending mode in the landscape material for the grass, and used a heightmap of the grass for the blending.

Carabiner

Wow, this is looking awesome for only a few days' work! I'd consider making the yellow fabric a separate floating piece, since it's pretty distinctly separate in the concept. Did you do any sort of post-process effect to get that slight outline effect?

mrgesy

Carabiner said:

Wow, this is looking awesome for only a few days' work! I'd consider making the yellow fabric a separate floating piece, since it's pretty distinctly separate in the concept. Did you do any sort of post-process effect to get that slight outline effect?

Hey thanks for the suggestion, I was also thinking of making an alpha card for the cloth pieces. As for the outline effect, yeah I used the post process material from the Stylized Rendering demo.

mrgesy

Progress so far. Is it coming out nicely?

mrgesy

Update so far:

theblueturtle_

Oh man, I love this! Here are a few suggestions. Your dirt path looks like the concept but I think that look is too uniform. Maybe if you add some zigzag to it and grass overgrowth/ patchiness it would look nicer. The lighting in your scene looks a little more subdued than the concept also. I'd punch it up to match the concept and play up those rock highlights some more. It would also be cool if you added some more volume to the grass to make it fluffy and three dimensional as opposed to just using the flat texture. The rocks in the concept are more earth tone and less green that what you have currently. Was that on purpose? Maybe if you changed the color to match it would add some more separation. Awesome work so far!

mrgesy

theblueturtle_ said:

Oh man, I love this! Here are a few suggestions. Your dirt path looks like the concept but I think that look is too uniform. Maybe if you add some zigzag to it and grass overgrowth/ patchiness it would look nicer. The lighting in your scene looks a little more subdued than the concept also. I'd punch it up to match the concept and play up those rock highlights some more. It would also be cool if you added some more volume to the grass to make it fluffy and three dimensional as opposed to just using the flat texture. The rocks in the concept are more earth tone and less green that what you have currently. Was that on purpose? Maybe if you changed the color to match it would add some more separation. Awesome work so far!

Thanks for the suggestions man! I agree the path is not so natural looking. I'll add more chaos to it. I notice the greenish hue on the rocks also, I will play with the color to match the concept. What did you mean about the grass fluffiness? You mean I should give the texture more dimension or I should use 3D grass cards? Thanks again!

theblueturtle_

No worries. Your 2d texture is great. I was thinking that you could mix in some more 3d grass cards along with it. By fluffiness I mean something with more height variation and depth to it. Something more along these lines:

mrgesy

Update: Removed outline effect which was incompatible with the newly added grass meshes.

mrgesy

Tweaked and polished a lot of things a bit more....

Tobbo

This is really cool! Nice job!

mrgesy

I think I'll wrap up this project here. Learnt a lot. Didn't get a lot of crits so I'll put this in my portfolio.

garcellano

Niiice, I love it, looks awesome!

KingKellogg

Wow, that looks pretty amazing.

JamesMeader

this is awesome, i really like the way its going. I'm doing something similar but in Marmoset Toolbag 2 but the results you've gotten from UE4 seem intriguing

xhi

I love it c: is the entire ground one texture painted or did you use the spray thing for ground textures in engine?

mrgesy

JAMESMEADER Thanks! Its too much stress to do it in Marmoset. I'd use Toolbag for smaller scenes. UE4 provides much more control

XHI C: I used in-engine landscape painting system. I created a terrain material which has various textures, and "sprayed" or blended them on the landscape.

RezNik

Nice!
Looks a lot like Torchlight, one of my favorite games

acealmighty13

What did you use for texturing?  I'm looking into adding something painted into my portfolio when i get some free time.

mrgesy

I used Photoshop for texturing

Kid.in.the.Dark

this has come along very nicely!

Some critiques here... just small ones (hopefully)

- Maybe a little dirt under the rocks would be nice, as the harsh cut between grass to rock breaks it for me a little.
- The linear path has a nice touch in your latest screenshot since it's coming up in a curve (line of influence and all) however the path itself is pretty clean... maybe break it up a little in some places? on the bottom right of your level screenie could use some breaking up since that area looks quite empty in your screenshot... it doesn't have to be much, just some splotches or dirt peeking through would be nice.

Lovely work so far, keep it up (Y)

MMKH

Awesome, great work.

GhostBlades

This is awesome Great work

I was wondering, what is your shader set up look like? Is it a simple material that you just take your color and plug it into the albedo and emissive?
Or is it something more complicated?

mrgesy

GhostBlades said:

This is awesome Great work

I was wondering, what is your shader set up look like? Is it a simple material that you just take your color and plug it into the albedo and emissive?
Or is it something more complicated?

Thanks for the kind words everyone!
Most of the materials are just an albedo texture plugged in. No emissive. I use values 1 for roughness and 0 for specular. Except the plants, they use sub-surface color and opacity mask inputs. The terrain mat is more complicated because I had to blend textures with other textures and solid colors.

GhostBlades

mrgesy said:

GhostBlades said:

This is awesome Great work

I was wondering, what is your shader set up look like? Is it a simple material that you just take your color and plug it into the albedo and emissive?
Or is it something more complicated?

Thanks for the kind words everyone!
Most of the materials are just an albedo texture plugged in. No emissive. I use values 1 for roughness and 0 for specular. Except the plants, they use sub-surface color and opacity mask inputs. The terrain mat is more complicated because I had to blend textures with other textures and solid colors.

Yeah, you did a great job

that's interesting that you didn't use emissive...when I tried just albedo, it didn't really look like a "flat color" type material - because I softened the edges on the object to save a bit of memory on the vert count. Is there something specific you did with the lighting in order to get that flat color stylized look?

mrgesy

GHOSTBLADES There's nothing really unusual I did to the lighting/models. I just modeled, hardened the proper edges to get good flat surfaces, and textured. For the lighting, it's just a directional light and a skylight to add ambient light. Also you have to make sure you textures are sharp and not too dark, else the lighting will wash away everything.

GhostBlades

mrgesy said:

GHOSTBLADES There's nothing really unusual I did to the lighting/models. I just modeled, hardened the proper edges to get good flat surfaces, and textured. For the lighting, it's just a directional light and a skylight to add ambient light. Also you have to make sure you textures are sharp and not too dark, else the lighting will wash away everything.

AHA! I see, you need to have a skybox that is bright enough to be able to have the skylight work
My scene is a night-time scene that's why it looks like crap haha
anyway thanks thanks for the info

mrgesy

You should still add a Skylight in a night time scene. Turn it down low and make it blueish. Use additional light sources like torches if possible to add interest

Shyralon

Woah, this turned out great! Awesome work!

theblueturtle_

sick! nicely done sir