[UE4} The Journey - Two Kingdoms

m4dcow

So I've been seeing a bunch of Entries from Artstation's Journey challenge, so I figured I would post mine here. It's presented in UE4, terrain done in world machine, assets done with Maya, ZBrush and Substance Designer. I even threw a greentooth in there . Here is the progress thread, so you can see how much worse this used to look:
https://www.artstation.com/contests/the-journey/challenges/3/submissions/2331

Feedback was non existent while posting over there, so if I participate in another challenge, I'll probably have a thread running over here for feedback/crit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVM2MJ_RFH0

Aeries

I absolutely love it; The towering mountains and jutting rock formations out of the ground really lend a sense of scale to the set. I've been considering using world machine, myself. The only thing I'd recommend might be a change in lighting - to me, it looks flat, and doesn't contribute to the mood of the scene when taking the music into account... there are two things I'd do, depending on your performance budget. First, I'd probably add heavy overcast with light rain, and have the sun with God Rays poking through a point in the clouds, and shift the set towards slightly more ambient blue hues and wet textures. I'd then port the project over to a variant of UE4 compiled with VXGI and HBAO+... but that said, that's what I've been using for ages now and I'm just super accustomed to it! :P

That's just coming out of personal taste though. As I said, I love your work and I hope you do more!

m4dcow

Aeries said:

I absolutely love it; The towering mountains and jutting rock formations out of the ground really lend a sense of scale to the set. I've been considering using world machine, myself. The only thing I'd recommend might be a change in lighting - to me, it looks flat, and doesn't contribute to the mood of the scene when taking the music into account... there are two things I'd do, depending on your performance budget. First, I'd probably add heavy overcast with light rain, and have the sun with God Rays poking through a point in the clouds, and shift the set towards slightly more ambient blue hues and wet textures. I'd then port the project over to a variant of UE4 compiled with VXGI and HBAO+... but that said, that's what I've been using for ages now and I'm just super accustomed to it! :P

That's just coming out of personal taste though. As I said, I love your work and I hope you do more!

Thanks alot man.

To be honest there is alot of stuff I am not really happy with in the scene, but I was getting to grips with quite a few things as I went along. There is alot of experimenting with terrain shaders and distance blending which was a great learning experience, but doesn't really show through. So I was forced to just use the default UE4 sky which doesn't give the lighting much help. I wish I could have had rain to accompany my puddles, and wet vibe could have worked very well for the scene.

The video was really just for the sake of having a video, the opening shot in the chasm could have really used more polish but I guess I wasn't paying too much attention at that point.

I wasn't really performance conscious besides doing LODs for the foliage, I mean, alot of the small rocks you see are the 2500 poly round boulders . I do hope to delve into VXGI and HBAO+ just to get a little experience, but I'll probably leave that for the next thing.

Again, I'm glad you liked it and thanks for the crit, even if I don't end up using it here it's the sort of advice I can consider for the next piece.

Aeries

Can't wait to see the next piece man! Keep up the good work.

m4dcow

Thanks.

Another thing I experimented with for a small part of the scene, was pixel depth offset. I used this on my little gravel/dirt piles to soften the transition between the bridge and terrain.

Beyond this if you had something that was had world space coordinates, you could blend the 2 height maps and have the dirt appear to fill the cracks etc...

joshmtyler

I'm really curious about how you made the canyon. I was having a lot of trouble cutting out a section for a river. I still don't have the landscape tools perfected I guess.

m4dcow

joshmtyler said:

I'm really curious about how you made the canyon. I was having a lot of trouble cutting out a section for a river. I still don't have the landscape tools perfected I guess.

I didn't do much of anything with the UE4 landscape tools. I generated everything in world machine imported and just made a few small tweaks smoothing stuff out.

The canyon walls have a not very good tri planar texture, but i tried to mostly cover the walls with rock meshes.