[UE4] Dense Rainforest (Finished/SmallBreakdown)

Luxap

Hiya guys!

Since a couple of weeks (with a large break in between couple of months) I Started this project to get to know speedtree and to get my foliage to look as good as I could (mainly because I was so inspired by Uncharted 4 foliage and the talks about them from Jacob Norris over on CGSociety (seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDIZa4O3jP4), I am making slow progress but I just love to experiment with new features and tips/tricks I get along the way.

Feel free to give me any feedback/critique, I'm trying to get to a point of realism with this, and I know that I can improve a lot! Especially on the lighting of the environment.

You can also checkout my Trello board to have a look at what I got planned.
https://trello.com/b/qLMGLP5U/foliage-project
Suggestions are always welcome.

Latest

Things I have thinkered around with on this project so far

• Getting to know dynamic lights, and all the dynamic shadow settings
• Light propagation volumes (Also know as Dynamic Global Illumination, Experimental feature) 
• Speedtree (had no prior experience with this program)
• Balancing SSS on foliage material
• Some plugins for maya to scatter foliage on a surface (painter in maya as well)

My progress so far, some earlier screenshots as well.

The initial grass blades, these are still used now, but I plan to bake them down onto a plane to reduce the polycount heavily. But I'm also pondering over trying to lod them out super quickly and see what result this gives me.

Hope this wasn't to much of a wall of text for you guys!

Thanks for stopping by!

xChris

That's looking pretty good! How are you approaching your sss in your material? Having a little trouble with that atm  where my grass look ridiculously bright at a distance under dynamic lights

Also, I'd recommend making a mic and mask to tint some of the leaves for more color variation. ND also has a foliage artist who traditionally models and paints their foliage (from what I've gathered)

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/m6Qqy

Nathan3D

Looking good SSS is a bit strong but it's a test like you said I'd put some colour variation in your ferns as well as some location based variation, maybe reduce the thickness of your grass blades a little? Also everything is really glossy don't know if that's just a Base material thing you have going on but it's looking good keep it up I love foliage lol  

Luxap

xChris said:

That's looking pretty good! How are you approaching your sss in your material? Having a little trouble with that atm  where my grass look ridiculously bright at a distance under dynamic lights

Also, I'd recommend making a mic and mask to tint some of the leaves for more color variation. ND also has a foliage artist who traditionally models and paints their foliage (from what I've gathered)

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/m6Qqy

Heya @xChris Thanks for the advice! I did add a bit of variance to the masking of the leaves already but I might be doing things as dulled edges (orange or yellow edges) next, but I like to keep it subtle and that is the main pain at the moment haha

My SSS shader is just a mask that I made in substance and I control that via a lerp between the mask and a black color so I can control the SSS a bit more in engine.

(if this sounds like chinese to you I would be happy to take a screenshot! )

And btw, that stuff that Naughty Dog did on the foliage is just mind blowing, it looks so freaking cool man!
Thanks for sharing!

Adelphia said:

Looking good SSS is a bit strong but it's a test like you said I'd put some colour variation in your ferns as well as some location based variation, maybe reduce the thickness of your grass blades a little? Also everything is really glossy don't know if that's just a Base material thing you have going on but it's looking good keep it up I love foliage lol  

Thanks so much @Adelphia I really love foliage as well, and doing this project only makes me love it more haha, I did reduce the grass blades a bit, as well as bake them onto a plane because they just were ridiculous in polycount, although they lost some shape when baking to planes, might have a look if I can find a good middle ground.

And yeah, I think the glossyness is still around in my last shot. But I do need to get in there and do a lot of rebalacing, but it is quite easy as the parameters are all controlled within unreal.

Really appreciate the feedback guys, thanks so much!

Now onto some more WIP!

Got 2 different shots, got some good feedback!
I like this first shot, but I really needed to think a bit more on logical foliage placement.



Went in and deleted/replaced parts of the foliage to make it a bit more varied, also got some more work done on the palm leaves, maybe I'll do some bark textures next, that's gonna be a challenge for me as I have never done anything like it, but we will see how it goes! And that's why I'm doing this, to improve!

Some old water shader that I am trying to blow new life into, the edges need a lot of work tho!
Some rocks would be nice as well (and some good ground textures now that I look at them)



Cheers for the feedback already guys, would love to know what you think!

Odow

"(if this sounds like chinese to you I would be happy to take a screenshot! )"

Pretty please ^-^

Luxap

Odow said:

"(if this sounds like chinese to you I would be happy to take a screenshot! )"

Pretty please ^-^

I did simplify it a bit, Shown in a screenshot below

So the way this is setup is just a quick thing to make it easier for me to adjust the SSS mask on the fly until I have the definitive ones ( and this helps me because I don't need to have a specific SSS map for all my foliage just yet, this allows quick iteration )

So what I do, is I feed it the SSS map, and have a color, and the "TexORColor" Parameter lets me blend between the two where "0" is the texture and "1" is the color, I then multiply this with the SSS color (which is also a parameter that I can adjust on the fly) and then feed this to the SSS input.

I can control the SSS strength with another parameter attached to the "Opacity" input, as this controls the SSS strength.

Hope you can follow on this, if not, let me know!

Full material (current state) Can be seen below



Hope you guys can read the shitty screencap haha  

Luxap

Small update! Had a super busy week at work so not much time left to spend on this project.

Boosted the LPV and did some more texturing as well!



Let me know what you think people!

Luxap

Redid the grass and also made a base for the day/night cycle that I am working on, as well as some more color variation to the foliage in general.



Got some nice moving shadows and stuff already going in, already did first pass on the sunrise as well, but not shown in the video, update coming soon! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1E6vX2ZcUc

Feedback more then welcome! 

Luxap

Some more work on the bark textures, trees and landscape material.
Still trying to optimize this scene a bit more, because it is only running at 30 fps on my laptop at the moment, but it is all dynamic and it has dynamic GI going and all that stuff.



If anyone has some good optimisation tips for unreal would be greatly appreciated
Also other tips and feedback are more then welcome! 

macoll

Hey that is great foliage man
For optimization, usually making LOD for foliage helps a lot but i am sure you know it gg !

Luxap

macoll said:

Hey that is great foliage man
For optimization, usually making LOD for foliage helps a lot but i am sure you know it gg !

Yeah you are correct! But doing good LOD's is going to be a challenge on these trees for sure!

Been reworking the whole scene, taking a step back and trying to really push the realism in lighting and such, it is hard to "restart" like this but something wasnt feeling right, still seems like something is missing... and also, I need to add something of interest to the scene and I am exploring options at the moment  

This is what I had before doing some initial tweaks (before I took a step back and reworked the whole scene)



And here is what I did during last (Superbusy) week/weekend.



Updated the scale of the trees, added some more smaller variations of the large tree that I have now, also worked on some Horta as a more close to ground foliage, still need to add a lot of texture/color variation to all of my current assets.

Also tried some stuff using HDRI's instead of using the base thingy that comes with Unreal, looks way better now, but still need to make a load of changes, so much work still ahead of me!

Might still try to change it back a bit more to what I had before, will need some more experimenting!

Tips/trick and advice definitely more then welcome! 
Cheers guys!

Luxap

Updated the scene, added some smaller foliage, some initial blockouts for the rocks and added some World aligned moss growing on top of them.

It feels like I am getting closer in terms of lighting, still not quite there yet tho!



To give you an idea of where I am going with this I added one of my references.
Looking at this I need to darken the color of the leaves a great bit, and balance the SSS a bit.



The thing I will be focusing on next is to add more color variation, add a proper ground texture and fill the ground with a bit more ground foliage as well.

Comments/Critique is more then welcome as always! 

Meloncov

I think you'd get closer to your reference by increasing the amount of variation in the materials of your leaves; brighter/darker base color, more variety in roughness and translucency, etc.

Luxap

Meloncov said:

I think you'd get closer to your reference by increasing the amount of variation in the materials of your leaves; brighter/darker base color, more variety in roughness and translucency, etc.

Thanks for the comment! And you are absolutely right on that, Working on that now, its gonna be a while to get this things done, because I plan to add a lot more variation in terms of plants/trees as well.

I did an update on this as well, some initial work on all the textures, Using Substance painter and baked all my textures out and then made some use of the filters to make them pop a bit more.


I am really happy on what I did in terms of having AO and some nice small shadows on the smaller foliage.
I do need to get some more variation in this still, gonna work on these things next.

Thanks for the comments!

Luxap

Hiya guys!
Its been a bit since my last update but I spent some time updating my site and updating this scene as well.

Doing some test on different light angles.
I'm kind of in favor for the first angle as I think it has a nice contrast between dark and light elements.

But please do share your thoughts on it as well.




Some smaller bits left to do but I am getting closer to the end of the project.
I'm gonna look at some vertex painted moss to cover bits of the bark on the trees, look into tweaking the light angle as well as make different times of day as a final presentation.

Let me know what you think,
Cheers guys!

Nuclear Angel

I agree that the first one is the most visually interesting one, and it would look gorgeous with some light shafts coming through the trees. I think you are missing some color variation at the moment, your trees all share the sameish green yellow tone, and if you could break it up and give the ambient light some more color I think you would be golden. 

Luxap

Nuclear Angel said:

I agree that the first one is the most visually interesting one, and it would look gorgeous with some light shafts coming through the trees. I think you are missing some color variation at the moment, your trees all share the sameish green yellow tone, and if you could break it up and give the ambient light some more color I think you would be golden. 

Will definitely look into that!
I personally like the colors the way they are now, but still! I will try it out because maybe I am getting blind from looking at it too much.

Cheers for the feedback!

Luxap

HappyConscript said:

Hey there Luxap,

It looks like this is coming along nicely.

One of my criticisms, an echo of others', would be the need for some pops of color. The addition of some tropical flowers here or there would really bring some nice visual / color contrast into your scene.

Another of my criticisms, is that there seems to be some room for improvement with regard to your scene's composition. Currently, I feel as though the middle ground (pond area) of the scene is truncated before the background (forest area). I actually preferred the composition showcased in earlier pictures; those featuring the white cube ahead of a dirt path; these pictures showcased a greater sense of depth about the environment.

I would suggest playing around with the composition a bit by expanding the middle ground and further iterating on the pond as your focal point. Currently the pond serves as a focal point, although I believe it is a bit odd as it seems to be this unnatural, almost perfect circle. In my mind, this isn't very interesting, but my eyes are drawn to it by the way it is framed by the fallen tree and adjacent trunk. The framing is not necessarily an issue, but I would rather be drawn to the focal point by its own merit. By playing with the pond's shape, and perhaps splashing some of those aforementioned pops of color around it, viewers' eyes will certainly be drawn to it.

Other than that, this has come a long way and is looking quite good. Keep up the great work!

Thanks so much for the awesome feedback @HappyConscript , will definitely look into this!

The addition of the flowers with contrasting colors could really help this scene much, so you are absolutely right there, I'll see what I can do.
As well as adjust the shape of the pond and maybe adjust the scene accordingly.

Maybe adding a little stream going through the scene could be nice, so I will definitely look into that, cheers!

Luxap

Gonna call this one done for now! 




To be honest didn't give the contrasting colors a try because I like the piece like this, but still, the feedback was so well deserved.

What could help this scene is making some kind of structure of ruin thing but I am not going to add that for now, might revisit this in the future.

My main goal is achieved tho,
I expanded my foliage asset library a lot and got to know the workflow of speedtree and how to handle it more properly. I feel that I am decent enough with the program now to handle asset creation.

I might still need to work on creation of trees because this project didn't really address that in a real manner.

Thanks all for the super awesome feedback! And if you have anything else that could help me on my next endeavour let me know,

Cheers,
Luxap

Luxap

As a finishing touch, here are some videos.
I really liked working on this project!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjOH4NbTQ3Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qy9BkOOYBw

And Thanks @Eric Chadwick for the frontpage! I really appreciate it! 

Onto the next one!
Cheer guys!

Michael_Ingrassia

My 2 cents...
Love your work. My critique would be to re-examine some of the foliage for stronger variation in color. I took a few photos off of my balcony this morning and you can see quite a bit of variation with dead or off color foliage. There seems to always be some sort of "dead" leaves even on a healthy plant or tree. Maybe adjusting the tree barks to all be a variation of brown but certainly different from one another.
On the video I would add some dust in the air, a few mosquitos buzzing by the camera and a blip or two of ripples in the water.

Christian Cunningham

Can you do a lighting breakdown? Great work btw

LaurentiuN

Looks beautiful man, congratz

Luxap

Christian Cunningham said:

Can you do a lighting breakdown? Great work btw

Cheers man!
Will work on that later this week and post it here.
Took some time to balance tho but in essence it is really simple

s1dK said:

Looks beautiful man, congratz

Aaaawh thanks man!
Appreciate it

Kanni3d

incredibly beautiful work, I also would love to see some lighting and maybe foliage breakdowns!!

Luxap

Michael_Ingrassia said:

My 2 cents...
Love your work. My critique would be to re-examine some of the foliage for stronger variation in color. I took a few photos off of my balcony this morning and you can see quite a bit of variation with dead or off color foliage. There seems to always be some sort of "dead" leaves even on a healthy plant or tree. Maybe adjusting the tree barks to all be a variation of brown but certainly different from one another.
On the video I would add some dust in the air, a few mosquitos buzzing by the camera and a blip or two of ripples in the water.

Thanks @Michael_Ingrassia,

I did add some color variation to the leaves, but it might not be that apparent. I'll be sure to keep this in mind on the next foliage I do because you are absolutely correct and it would help the realism.
And I did add some fireflies in the evening video, but kept away from it in the day shot.

Thanks for taking to time for writing this awesome feedback!

Kanni3d said:

incredibly beautiful work, I also would love to see some lighting and maybe foliage breakdowns!!

Cheers man! Will try and take some time this week to do that.

Luxap

Hiya guys!

Threw some stuff together and did a small lighting breakdown. This is not going to be that in depth tho, but if you have any questions, feel free to contact me personally via messages.

Lets start with the process first



Then all the things that make the lighting up and the settings I used. Remember these are personal and should be tweaked at your preference, there is no "right" lighting, so this setup might not work for your current scene.

Also keep in mind that I used a HDRI which I rendered to a Cubemap to use as a backplate as well using this technique here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIaYIuAEQuA

And some good HDRI maps can be found here:

http://hdrmaps.com/freebies?p=1

So! Lets start with the Directional Light

The thing I tweaked the most in this panel are the number of shadow cascades and the exponent and all the stuff attached to that. Because I wanted to get some really nice and crisp shadows.

I use Temperature because I like to use it, but there is no special reason for that, and ass you can see my scene uses Dynamic lighting, so Dynamic Inderect lighting is turned on as well as this affects the Light Propogation Volumes. Which can be activated using the link below:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/LightPropagationVolumes/



Next up the skylight

You can see that I used a Cubemap to drive this, and that is why the value is super low, because if you put this to high the scene would be overblown with light.



Then the fog

The settings I used below show a quite visible fog. But these settings can all be tweaked to your liking!



The godray material

I used this tutorial for the godray material and then slightly adjusted it so I had some transitions from more visible to less visible using a simple sine node seen at the bottom of the material.



And then lastly the post process volume.

The most important things here are the AO and the AA filtering, balancing the AO was both challenging and fun, because I wanted some nice depth but didnt want to make it too obvious. And then changing the AA to Temporal AA for some more smooth alpha maps and and overall smoother piece.

Also a thing to not it to lock the Auto Exposure to a certain value because else you will be constantly readjusting the values in the post process volume.



Hope you guys enjoy this mini breakdown. And don't hesitate to ask me some questions if you have some

Cheers,
Luxap

macoll

Great result, love it ! ...and thanks for the tips, gg

AhmedSpunky

Wow really nice Luxap i like a lot the foliage keep up the good work 

Justin Wagner

This is looking really nice so far! I would recommend looking at Megascans for some references on the plants. All of those textures are photo-scanned so they would be great to try to match.

Keep up the good work!

Luxap

macoll said:

Great result, love it ! ...and thanks for the tips, gg

Cheers man!

Justin Wagner said:

This is looking really nice so far! I would recommend looking at Megascans for some references on the plants. All of those textures are photo-scanned so they would be great to try to match.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks man, I used them quite a bit for reference on the ferns, but still replicating those real life scanned materials is a pain! But I'm quite happy with the end result, thanks for the feedback!

HappyConscript said:

Hey Luxap,

I am glad to see you spent some time working on the composition of your piece. It looks so much better and the final product came out great!

Very well done!

Really appreciate the feedback man! It did help out a lot!
Thanks!

AhmedSpunky said:

Wow really nice Luxap i like a lot the foliage keep up the good work 

Thanks!

Btw, 
As an update to this, I just put this project on gumroad so you can find out some things that I did on this and maybe support me a bit as well, but thats totally up to you.

Follow this link to the project!
*EDIT* Gumroad taken down because you cannot redistribute Speedtree asetts.

Thanks so much for all your support guys, really means a lot to me!

Cheers,
Luxap