[UE4] Pink Tree
polycounter lvl 5
Hello everyone! I've always been completely fascinated by fantasy landscapes, so I decided to finally take the plunge with UE4 and make a complete scene. I've poked and prodded at various parts of UDK (back when the Dungeon Defenders Development Kit was released) and never made it very far, and then when UE4 came out I've poked and prodded some more.
I recently came across this image, Pink Tree, by Laura Haapamaki: (This entire project started with Laura's generous permission)
This will be my first "real" environment in UE4. (Although I've been doing 3D in general for ~10 years or so.) Here is my very basic quick-pass at, well, getting started. I was unsure how to begin a scene like this, so, I just dove in
I realize I'm not very good at following my reference - although quite honestly, for this project, I am more focused on the assets themselves and creating a playable environment since this scope of work is still new to me. Also, I'm using a 21:9 monitor that is doing me absolutely no favors in maintaining aspect ratio and spacing of the assets in comparison to the original scene
I've created everything in the scene from scratch, aside from the skydome (which is just stock UE4.) All materials are procedural at this point. My "glowing" water shader leaves much to be desired, and the waterfalls are just placeholders for the moment - they will eventually be switched out - or at least masked with some, hopefully, more robust particles. The shape of my tree trunk is completely wrong. Also, the ground textures have normal maps, I haven't plugged them into my actual material yet.
My workflow so far has been meshing and UV mapping in Maya, sculpting and baking a normal map in zBrush, creating a tilable texture sample in Substance Designer, and then finally painting the mesh in Mudbox and exporting my base diffuse from there. (The exception being the ground was painted with vertex colors as a layer blend material.)
Tree sculpt:
Flat tree base (low poly):
Low poly tree w/ normals and base color (featuring a rock that vaguely resembles a weird skull!)
I'm going for a, uh, I guess "generic" game art style? Not photorealistic by any means, nor handpainted.
Some materials from Substance Designer - I have no idea what I'm doing, but my results seem to be usable, at least:
Stone (just learning SD5's "bevel" node!)
"Ground" - neither dirt nor mud, but something along those lines. Maybe if you squint?
Grass
I'm having a blast so far, and I've already learned a ton. Every time I look at the original image I notice more details that I can't wait to start on! I'm super excited to flesh this scene out, and I look forward to sharing my progress and developing my skills!
I recently came across this image, Pink Tree, by Laura Haapamaki: (This entire project started with Laura's generous permission)
This will be my first "real" environment in UE4. (Although I've been doing 3D in general for ~10 years or so.) Here is my very basic quick-pass at, well, getting started. I was unsure how to begin a scene like this, so, I just dove in
I realize I'm not very good at following my reference - although quite honestly, for this project, I am more focused on the assets themselves and creating a playable environment since this scope of work is still new to me. Also, I'm using a 21:9 monitor that is doing me absolutely no favors in maintaining aspect ratio and spacing of the assets in comparison to the original scene
I've created everything in the scene from scratch, aside from the skydome (which is just stock UE4.) All materials are procedural at this point. My "glowing" water shader leaves much to be desired, and the waterfalls are just placeholders for the moment - they will eventually be switched out - or at least masked with some, hopefully, more robust particles. The shape of my tree trunk is completely wrong. Also, the ground textures have normal maps, I haven't plugged them into my actual material yet.
My workflow so far has been meshing and UV mapping in Maya, sculpting and baking a normal map in zBrush, creating a tilable texture sample in Substance Designer, and then finally painting the mesh in Mudbox and exporting my base diffuse from there. (The exception being the ground was painted with vertex colors as a layer blend material.)
Tree sculpt:
Flat tree base (low poly):
Low poly tree w/ normals and base color (featuring a rock that vaguely resembles a weird skull!)
I'm going for a, uh, I guess "generic" game art style? Not photorealistic by any means, nor handpainted.
Some materials from Substance Designer - I have no idea what I'm doing, but my results seem to be usable, at least:
Stone (just learning SD5's "bevel" node!)
"Ground" - neither dirt nor mud, but something along those lines. Maybe if you squint?
Grass
I'm having a blast so far, and I've already learned a ton. Every time I look at the original image I notice more details that I can't wait to start on! I'm super excited to flesh this scene out, and I look forward to sharing my progress and developing my skills!
Replies
The foliage on the tree is just regular meshes - no SpeedTree. Currently it's using a SimpleGrassWind paramater with lerps for all values to give it some randomness. Super easy to implement, but the results look like the tree is kind of... squirming? I plan on redoing the wind effect via vertex weights so that it's more constrained to just the long/bottom parts of the foliage. I have since also started on two particle leave effects (not pictured), one for leaves falling from the tree, and one for leaves flowing across the water towards the falls. (Which now also have a mist effect rising from the "canyon")
Leaf textures:
Lighting this scene properly is turning out to be quite difficult as I'm trying to remove the influence of top-down sunlight and shift it towards light coming from the water. The lighting in under constant revision and won't be finalized until I have everything in place in the scene.
The big monolithic trees around the outer edges of the scene are just placeholders at this point so that I can get an idea of how deep the background needs to be to get the full "lost in a foggy forest" effect. As I work that out, next up will be creating unique trees and root structures, interjected with some rocks and stones.
What is your lighting set up currently?
My skylight was cranked up to try to simulate the ambient glow of the water, and I think that's what is washing out my normal maps. (Although I've now turned that down significantly, and it's not much better) I have my base directional light directly overhead (I've tried all sorts of angles, even shining upwards instead of down) and I'm not thrilled with any of them.
I have three other point lights with enlarged sources hoving over the water, one on the left, right, and behind, to try to send up some of the light the water would be emitting - and two or three others to selectively brighten up some areas that I thought were just too dark. Then there is also a spotlight shining from the water (on both left and right sides of the tree) to throw some light onto the bark.
Lit, in "Game View" mode:
Detail Lighting, in editor mode:
Detail lighting, in "Game View" mode:
i would make your water glow I think that will help the scene and then add lighting where it needs to be...also since your using point lights you get hot spots because of the light fall off, you can actually stretch out the light volume so you wont get the circular hot spot. if the water is glowing you could probably replace your spot lights with point lights.
Also what are you doing with your materials can you show us the material properties?
Doh - the post process volume! That's exactly what I needed. I've never used it before, but was able to crank up the AO to bring out my normal maps some more. (And added some depth of field - worth keeping?)
As for my materials, they are all about as basic as it gets at this point. Diffuse map, normal map, and specular set to black. On a few things I have two normal maps that I'm blending together - one mesh based normal map, and a second texture based map. I have the texture based normal map set up so that I can tile it as needed, as they are just the little seamless samples I made in Substance Designer, rather than having to tile it and check and adjust umpteen times in Photoshop if they were combined into one image ahead of time.
Should I look into making AO maps for my materials rather than relying on the post processing volume? Also, should I actually be making Metallic/Specular/Roughness maps? I've found some people make maps for each, and I've seen others claim they are basically on/off values. Pretty much all of the materials are matte/rough at this point - with the main exception going to be the rocks in the water and along the shore line, once I actually start making "real" rocks... I suppose it'd look nice for them to have a bit of a wet shine to them. Also, in retrospect, now I am seeing my scene doesn't have any highlights - only shadows. Would giving my materials a specular with a high roughness value/map help address that, perhaps?
In regards to making the water glow - I briefly harassed the Emissive Color output, but the results left much to be desired. The fact that I was able to make the water shader at all was a miracle, but I think I may have to revisit that idea and see if I can make it work. I've pulled up a few references to emissive materials, I'll see what I can do!
The reason the Spherical Reflection affected the water and nothing else is because your spec is set to 0 and then your metallic and roughness are set to .5 (is what it does if you have nothing plugged in) and with a .5 metalic your drawing on your spec value. (1 metalic negates spec and anything under 1 you start to utilize your spec)
check out https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/PhysicallyBased/index.html
Can you post your node tree for the water?
And here is currently what the water looks like with those settings:
The shader is a mess and currently not everything is connected - it's a mashup of several tutorials/guides/posts combined a bit with me messing around. I still need to convert a lot of it to parameters and instantiate it for the waterfalls (smaller normal map tiling and different panner settings).
I will start to poke at specular/roughness and see what I can come up with - and I'll also attempt to generate some custom AO maps and see how much of a difference that will make. Thank you for all of the info/advice so far!
And here is currently what the water looks like with those settings:
The shader is a mess and currently not everything is connected - it's a mashup of several tutorials/guides/posts combined a bit with me messing around. I still need to convert a lot of it to parameters and instantiate it for the waterfalls (smaller normal map tiling and different panner settings).
I will start to poke at specular/roughness and see what I can come up with - and I'll also attempt to generate some custom AO maps and see how much of a difference that will make. Thank you for all of the info/advice so far!
At the moment it feels like you're getting in your own way with your water setup.
That depth fade node is probably not working out for you in the Base Color, especially if it's default settings.
The way you have it now, it does something and the second node completely overrides it.
If you want to modulate between values, use a distance blend node.
The one you have running into opacity is better but add some constant 1 nodes to it and turn them into parameters to get some control.
Also, and this is entirely up to you, I would add a base opacity value. Right now your water is completely opaque and that's what's giving it that viscous and slushy look.
Separate your metallic and specular constants.
Also, use constant 1 nodes instead of constant 3, they're not doing anything for you because A) Metallic is essentially a 0-1 parameter and because
Same goes for roughness.
If I where you, I'd setup my normals differently.
Personally I favor a setup with more variation.
Also, use adds instead of lerps and lose that multiply.
You're doing it right in your base material so just do the same thing here.
Lastly, and this is just personal preference, lose the refraction.
If your water is over something organic you will barely notice the effect and it will cause artifacts where your water intersects your ground.
Also, refraction is not good friends with depth fade.
Oh, and if you want SSR on your water, there's a setting for that in your material attributes.
I did some water work in my last project, I'm not claiming to be an authority on water and there's tons of solutions that are better but this is what I went with:
http://imageshack.com/a/img923/48/qF5uvu.jpg
That bottom part is from an old setup and I should update that to a distance blend soon
And this is what it looks like in a scene:
http://imageshack.com/a/img921/1540/Ekv4aS.jpg
Cheers
I ultimately ended up setting up a fresnel as the opacity for a depth fade, and then plugged that in for opacity. Along with a few other tweaks, I feel like a lot of the "slush" feeling is now gone and it has a crisper, more shiny-watery appearance. (While still keeping the glowing brightness of the water.)
I've also done a bit of texture work with the tree bark and foliage - trying out various specular/roughness textures, and also adding an AO texture. Both the bark and foliage also have the base diffuse texture being multiplied by 0.25 as an emissive value to brighten them up a tiny bit. I find it very interesting - the difference between how a computer thinks a scene will be lit, versus how an artist says the scene is lit.
Next up, I'm going to start focusing on the secondary assets and filling in the big chunks of the outside environment - the bigger trees getting foliage and thickened up, the larger rocks, etc. I'm sure I'll then be doing another lighting pass afterwards!
Still some depth issues with where the waterfall plane meets the lower water pool that I haven't tweaked yet, and I still need a ripple effect for the bottom pool surface.
Here's an overall sample of where the scene sits currently:
Now I need to get some white water/foam bits going over the edge of the falls, and something to indicate water going towards to the falls around the upper rocks.
Here's where I'm at with the waterfall currently - I managed to get a ripple effect going that I'm fairly happy with, and I instantiated the water material and made the bottom pool have more of a glow to it than the top level of water. (Still need to make the pre-waterfall effects for the top water, though.)
Here is the entire scene again, with the toned down water.
I've also started working on the bridge again, hopefully that will be finished tonight!
Watery/wet boards - I'm having a hard time getting in the middle of "pouring-rain" type of wet and "100% humidity" wet.
I've started on my foliage as well - only two grass-ish models so far, and a little particle system to simulate the little white bugs/moths that we have here that always swarm the grass. The grass textures are a simple first pass - decent looking grass is harder than I was expecting! I think it's a bit too green and a bit too, uh, clumpy? (And in retrospect, I need to get rid of most of the grass this side of the bridge in comparison with the original concept.)
I got rid of the grass that I'm not sure why I put in in the first place, and added in a few new plants and the glowing mushrooms. (Which I've decided should be transparent, as I can't quite tell in the concept.) I added some mossy "gunk" floating along the edges the water, as well as some lily pads with flowers. Logic tells me they wouldn't be growing in moving water near falls, but I like them, so they'll stay.
I'm still flailing with lighting. I'm trying to get kind of a "path" lit through as if it were a game level, while also trying not to have any dark spots that are too noticeable, either.
Here's what I have so far for the backside if you follow the path around the tree: