Vegetation Exercise

dantori

Hello polycount people! Yet another 3D art student reporting! I've been working on a little vegetation exercise lately. This is an own project of mine that I've done in 3 weeks on my spare time or at school when time allowed it. The main goal was to try and learn more about vegetation modeling and setup in unreal. 

Cheers

dantori

I posted some renders on the Quixel tools group recently and got some requests of a breakdown.
So here's a quick version sort of.

For the rhododendron bush I wanted to go for as few overdraws as possible and therefore meshed out the entire bush. The idea was to take 3 screenshots of it and make a third LOD step using only 3 planes. Although it was never used in the end mostly due to time and lazyness. (Shame..)

Highpoly leaves for the most common plant in the scene. I choose to make them properly in zbrush instead of just slapping a photo on a plane in maya and call it a day. Pros - I could easily get an ok normal, cavity and heightmap thanks to GrabDocAndHeight and different matcaps in zbrush. Con- it takes a bit longer than just using a good image.

So for the texturing I imported the Normal and Heightmap I got from Zbrush into DDO for a quick starting point. Then I used NDO to convert my NormalMap into a specular. This worked as a base for both Roughness (mainly just inverted and a bit modified in this case) and albedo. The albedo is mainly just a quickly handpainted blur of green colors set to overlay in photoshop. The rest was just tweaking values and lots of mixing with layers. And ofcourse I constantly looked at references so it wouldn't be totally off. 
Pros- Quick way for me to get quite good results fast since most of the work is already done. Con- Might be a bit of a workaround if you're not that used to photohop and mixing with layers. 


Final texture. Cropped from 1024 to 256.


Main material setup in unreal:

Hope that made sense at all of how some of the stuff was made. 
Keep in mind that this is my first forest environment and was done as an experiment. So there is prolly a lot of better ways doing this. Cheers  

wirrexx

that scene is looking warm and beautifull! Yet so destroyed. SUBBED . Love it!

Shyralon

Wow, really impressive!
I think you did a pretty good job in using so few assets and still make the scene look alive.
Also thanks for the breakdown!
What was your lighting setup looking like?

Daedalus51

Really nice! Although I think the first shot is the best!
Did you use DistanceField lighting for this? I assume the geo is too detailed for proper light baking

Cheers!

defragger

Wow really nice. I like the mood!
Also thanks for the breakdown!
Subbed !

dantori

Thanks, 
I will continue with this a bit more the upcoming 3 weeks before calling this exercise done. I'm working on a new environment for a school course at the moment and will therefore not be able to edit this one as much as I'd like. But nevertheless I will absolutely try and make it better as a portfolio piece when time allows it. So any feedback is very much welcome! (get your chainsaws! :P)

@ SHYRALON /
There is just a basic skylight for ambience, a weak spotlight on the car area and a movable directional light set to 7.

@ DAEDALUS51  /
I haven't actually looked into DFGI or DFAO much at all on this. The light bake came out "ok" but I'd like to take some time soon and do it more properly with a better setup all in all.
(Still feel kinda noobish regarding light)

Meloncov

The vegetation looks really great, but the truck, and to a lesser degree the boulder, are letting you down. It feels like much less care were put into them.