[UE4] Medieval Courtyard - The Witcher 3 Fan Art

Adel0n

Hey guys!

I found this concept from The Witcher 3 and I really like it. I think it looks more intresting and has better composition that my previous project. Also it has cool gothic modular pieces and vegetation, which I never create before. And I want to play with this water particles for the fountain and animation for flags and vegetation.

So, my goals for this project:

• Learn more about trim texturing
  
• Learn how create plants
• To practice with Master Material and Vertex Painting
• Create water material and particles
• More practice with Substance Painter/Designer and Unreal Engine 4
  
• Create an awesome environment
  
• Get a job
  

Concept:

Fast paintover:

Blockout:

I really want to work in the industry, so I need proofs of my skills such as a good environment project in my portfolio, and I will try to do best I can. Hope you help me

artbychien

the modular planning and block-out look good! keep it up

EpicToadGOd

Hey if you are ever up to it you could join my small team, we are working on a prehistoric project and if you are wanting to do more with environment, this is definitely something we need. I really like what you are doing and it would be absolutely amazing if you could. If your at all interested please email me at EpicToadGod@gmail.com Thank you, have a great day!

Montreseur

Adel0n said:

Hey guys!

I found this concept from The Witcher 3 and I really like it. I think it looks more intresting and has better composition that my previous project. Also it has cool gothic modular pieces and vegetation, which I never create before. And I want to play with this water particles for the fountain and animation for flags and vegetation.

So, my goals for this project:

• Learn more about trim texturing
  
• Learn how create plants
• To practice with Master Material and Vertex Painting
• Create water material and particles
• More practice with Substance Painter/Designer and Unreal Engine 4
  
• Create an awesome environment
  
• Get a job
  

Concept:

Fast paintover:

Blockout:

I really want to work in the industry, so I need proofs of my skills such as a good environment project in my portfolio, and I will try to do best I can. Hope you help me

Planning looks good, did you use BSP in unreal for the blockout or modeled to the grid in a modeling package?

Adel0n

@artbychien Thank you!
@EpicToadGOd Thanks for the offer. Unfortunately, I need some paid work. Good luck with the project!
@Montreseur I use grid and snaps in Max.

Litle update for today, at first actually didn't want to post, because not much has been done. Some high poly work

Adel0n

Started doing first modules and texture

kymo_thys

good progress! keep us updated hehe

Adel0n

Started working on textures


Bricks texture, made in Substance Designer.
"Texture Creation with Rogelio Olguin" is extremly useful, helped me a lot.

macoll

Really great start ! Keep up

Adel0n

@kymo_thys @macoll Thanks, guys!

Some more details and lighting test.

Grusti

Great start! looking forward

Adel0n

@IlyaIvanovArt Thanks, Ilya!

Continue working after a small pause. Added the fountain and broke the lighting


Now when I check "Cast Shadow" in the Skylight, instead of cool shadows that were in the previous post, for some reason I get this.

Good news, I did what I had to do from the beginning and find a location from the concept. And now I'm a little confused what to do, because at the concept we have a bit of dark atmosphere, when in the game it is actually more colorful. What is better?
Also I like an idea with the tree, I think I will do the same.

Adel0n

Tried to fix lighting, reworked base texture, added torch and flag. Fire from ParticleEffects Demo.
 

kymo_thys

good progress! the flag should be taller though, it looks squashed to me, there needs to be some room below and above the emblem. keep going!

Adel0n

@kymo_thys thanks!

Added another flags and started messing around with vegetations and post effects, made LUT. A bit of critics would be good

LUT, maybe it will be useful


My first plants, never made it before, so I am glad to hear any critics.

High poly:

Material:

Inside engine:

I think it is not as good as it could be, and I will look for ways how to improve it.

And some fun with APEX Cloth, it is realy cool 

Adel0n

And new update here!
So, I fixed my grass shader, made thyme and ivy, fixed vertex normals in foliage using SlideNormalThief,  made textures brighter after reading this (first second) great articles and tried to enable DFAO. Actually I dont like vegetation, it dont look natural, but I dont know how to fix it.

With DFAO


Without DFAO


Textures before


Textures after


And more screens

Benvox2

Hey I really like your ivy placement, it really helps to lead the eye around your scene. Are you using a flat roughness value for the ivy material or will you add a roughness map for it? I think it could also benefit from some colour variation on the leaves.

Adel0n

@Benvox2 Thanks for feedback!
For roughness I'm just using desaturated color

Adel0n

Messed around with water particles this time, I wanted to create them from scratch, but it was a bit difficult for me, so actually I just reworked standard particles for my needs.

Adel0n

Tree sculpt

Test in engine

I think, it looks like the tree too small or the fountain too big

melli06

Hey it looks great! I think that the tree is too small (not sure). Biggest issue currently is the color values are way too saturated. Compare your most recent image with the concept. The concept makes more with less color, so the greens of the leaves should be less saturated. Also I would reduce the contrast between the sunlight to the ambient courtyard lighting. Either by making the lower courtyard lighter, or by making the sunlight less intense. I think the latter would do best but its your piece. Great work and best O Luck!

Adel0n

@melli06 Thanks for the feedback! I made this more saturated than on the concept because I want be more close to the original mood of the game.

Finally made the tree.

Benvox2

Looking good man! I'd say the foliage is a bit too bright and saturated though, a little variation in the ivy leaves, flowers and tree leaves could push this a long way. I like your falling leaf effect, was that hard to set up?

Adel0n

@Benvox2   Thanks a lot! I also dont like how the foliage looks, I'll try to improve. No, actually falling leaves is a pretty simple Mesh Emitter particle with Initial Velocity and Init Mesh Rotation.

kohg

The weakest part of this piece is by far the foliage/nature bits. I think you'd be better off getting rid of the tree and the ivy which are hiding some details, atleast for now, once you get better at nature you could always revisit this scene and improve it.

Adel0n

@kohg I know it, and I will try to improve it. If this doesn't help, than remove.
Is there some tutorials or something, what can help me? I've actually read and watched a lot of them, but maybe I'm missing something important, that vegetation doesn't look believable. Maybe I need to try SpeedTree? Why my foliage look so bad?
And besides vegetation, what else do I need to improve?

Benvox2

@Adel0n I disagree with removing it entirely, the meshes and base textures seem quite good. In UE4 it is very difficult in my experience to get foliage to behave how you want especially in a scene with contrasting lights/shadows like this.

I would add denaturation, albedo tint and emissive node parameters to your materials and play with them. Also adjust lighting to suit the foliage but this is a long process of trial and error, good luck!

Stavaas

Scene is looking great man! On the whole foliage issue, I think the main problem is that they are too saturated, so they stick out a lot. I'd say instead of getting rid of the foliage, try tweaking it until you are happy with it, rather than learning from a different project, and then coming back to this one again.

kohg

@Adel0n
Your ivy for instance, doesn't look very believable. It has to many leaves, they all look the same (same model, same color) and they are all oriented to the same direction too. The ivy progression also doesn't seem believable, you should probably try out the ivy generator plugin for max. The ivy that is furthest looks to big. Same problem with the tree, the leaves are all the same, though some look lighter in color. David Lesperance's Introduction to game art at gumroad has a video dedicated to ivy where he goes over some techniques, i'm sure there are other tutorials out there, but from the top of my head that's the only one i could think of.

Adel0n

@Stavaas @kohg Thanks a lot for the feedback, guys! I'll redo my foliage considering your comments.
@Benvox2 Thanks for the advice. I really like how the foliage look in your Dark Souls Environment, I think your scene looks very cool, and I use it as a reference.

Soo, for today I decided to keep the plants away and add more details. Made a door, a bench and first decals. Also tried to enable r.TonemappedFilm (i think it looks better with this, but can't find info what it actually does )  and a little post effects corrections. And at the last moment I decided to play around with the material of vegetation, and finally found a reason why it was so bright in the darkness. Actually it's because my subsurface color was very bright, but I didn't notice it and searched for the reason in another. Now it looks better, but I will make some changes in the shader later.

Adel0n

Made shader for Vertex Painting. It blends with cracks in red channel, moss in green and dirt in blue. I decided that for moss and dirt I don't need separate textures and for optimization I just change the color of the base texture using multiply.

Simple shader

Adel0n

Messing around with foliage shader. Is it better or still bad?

Adel0n

I continue to work on the environment. I decided to remove the large tree, because it looked very bad and broke the composition. Now I think what to make instead of the tree. Maybe someone has ideas?

Adel0n

I think I did everything what I could and wanted to do. Of course, not everything I like and see that in some places it don't look good enough. But any work can be polished to infinity, it's time to stop and accept that this is my level for now, and keep working, hoping that the next environments will be better.
In general I am happy with the result, learned a lot of new things, what is most important I think.
I will prepare final screenshots, so any feedback and critics are welcome, until it's not too late

Benvox2

Massive improvements over time as you can see from the screenshots so you should be pretty happy with that. That last image is looking really good I agree that the large tree was blocking a lot of your nice archways. 

If it's not too late all I would say is that some of the blacks in the ivy are a bit too black and the flowers maybe a tad too saturated. Do you find it difficult to adjust foliage colour/intensity etc? I only ask as I have a ton of trouble with it.

Adel0n

@Benvox2 Thank you, you greatly helped me during my work. Yeah, when your foliage is in the light and dark contrast places at the same time, it is difficult to get a good result. actually I added tint and intensity to color, subsurface and emissive, as you suggested, and played with parameters.

Nathan3D

Really nice stone work loving the archways. Lightinglooks good as well. The only thing thats bringing the scene down for me is the flowers they arnt reading very well the blue ones are worse it seems like sticks of blue rather than flowers the orange ones are a bit better you can see some colour variation
Everything else is excellent work,  keep it up  

Adel0n

So, final result. Thanks to everyone who helped me and watched the progress. More screens - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8Pl2x