[UE4] Watermill Cottage Environment

lloydj14

Hello,
Back with my next environment and I'm going for an outdoor scene to allow me to work on vegetation, trees, and water. As it is something I haven't properly attempted before. I thought I'd get this up early so I can get feedback the whole way through.

I plan to stick fairly closely to the concept for the shapes, placement and colour/overall feel but apart from that, wI will take liberties where I think it improves the scene. 

My goal is to have this close to finished by the new year so I am aiming to update this at least every other day. C&C is really appreciated so please lay it on thick

Current Progress: Not much to show just the initial blockout



Concept

Concept by Andree Wallin - http://andreewallin.com/

lloydj14

Update. A busy couple of days at work but managed to get some time tonight to do a more detail blockout.

I think that next I'm going to create some textures for the grass, path and stream edge (Rocky material).

I'm also considering mixing 2D art for the mountains rather than sculpting terrain or do people think that it would be better to show that I can use the terrain tools and create nice looking landscapes in 3D ?



Still not much to show if anyone is think anything is looking drastically wrong so far shout up.

lloydj14

Just a small update. Did this back on Friday just haven't got round to posting it up. Happy with the height and roughness but think the colour still need some work. C&C welcome



Think I need to give the stones and twigs more contrast and make a few more of the exposed and not covered in dirt.


What I'm trying achieve is that countryside path/ track sort of like below but a lot less stoney. 

Ashervisalis

How close are you wanting to be to the concept? It seems like your land could be a bit smoother yet have more larger hills. If this is a mountainous area of the country, the land is being pushed together, making hills like in the far left side of the concept. Dirt texture looks good and the whole thing looks like its coming along well

lloydj14

Been really busy recently moving house but im back and need to start posting here more regularly.

@Ashervisalis I plan to do more work to landscape later on and at the time was deciding how to do the mountains in the back ground. Think I'm going to use some sculpted static meshes to save time.

Latest scene progress.


 Put down a basic grass and set lighting /fog to give a feel of final scene. Still feel like both the grass foliage and ground texture need lots of work. Path texture feels very monotone need to add some variation.



Stone Block walk for house height pass.



As always all comments appreciated.

gsokol

This looks cool!  The blockout alone got me excited.  Just a nice layout.

your lighting is a miss for me.  The shadows are too dark and there isnt really enough bounce.  The lighting in the ref is really soft and warm, almost like an overcast.  More bounce, softer shadows.  

lloydj14

@gsokol cheers glad you likenthenlook of it.  The shadows defiantly needed lightening was having issues with lighting. I didn't like the look a skylight on it own was giving to the rest of the scene.

Spent the afternoon trying to lighten the shadow,  and found that you can adjust the environement colour in the world settings to lighten shadows and combined with a very subtle skylight is giving a much better result.

Finished the colour and roughness for the block material last night



Scene progress. Updated lighting a bit more and UVed the mill house to get the block material on it. 



Next up I think I'm going to do the thatched roof texture and a couple of wood textures so I can get the house finished. 

fhurtubise

Watch out for these ground textures, they're heavily oversaturated in the green/yellow spectrum. I'm not experienced in Unreal so I'm not sure if it comes from your camera/filter settings, but if you're gonna rely heavily on filters keep in mind you might have to tweak some of the textures to compensate.

lloydj14

@fhurtubise cheers for the pointer. No post process effects yet. Will look into balancing the saturation and tones in the ground textures. The only ground texture is done so far is the path the rest are placeholder atm.

Tomiajayi

you picked some crazy concept! good luck with all those trees!!

lloydj14

Only got a couple of hours this evening but got a thatch roof material a good way. Still a bit WIP think it needs more work to define the individual strands as at the moment doesn't read well with colour. Would really welcome some feedback on this material especially as it is still fairly simple and early stages. I was aiming for a grass thatch roof similar to this http://thatchroofsdurban.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ThatchGrass1.jpg





Be back soon.

lloydj14

Right, tonight I tried to create an old wood. Actually found this really challenging to try and create natural looking groves and crevices without making it look really noises. Again this is still WIP but want to get as many of the textures down so I can get a good idea of what the scene will look like. The I'll go back and improve all of them.




As always all feedback is appreciated and please speak your minds I need to exactly how my work is looking.

lloydj14

Right down to the last couple of materials for the mill house. Managed to get a little bit of time to start the window material (still very early WIP). Spent a bit of learning tonight by experimenting and just playing with SD and mask generators. Never tackled a detailed glass material and not as simple as I thought it was going to be. The glass isn't transparent as I don't want people to be able to see into the houses as they will be empty. And because of this I went for a slightly frosted look so it makes more sense why the glass can't be seen through clearly.

As always feedback is appreciated.

lloydj14

Completed all the UVs for the house and moved the house into a separate scene to test and alter the materials. Changed the thatch to a stick base thatch which I think reads better at distance. Any critique is welcome

lloydj14

My progress on the mini scene. Almost happy to call this done even though there is lots of room for improvement.

Would really welcome some critique here and also any tips on how to get grass looking good in UE4. It really late here but wanted to get this up tonight.

lloydj14

Are the shadows really dark for most people on their monitors ? Viewing this on my phone the shadows are really dark and non of the detail is visible so I assume I might have my monitors set up wrong as it looked fine last on my monitor but doesn't on my other devices. 

supremedalek925

I like the look of the frosted glass. I am on a PC and I can say the shadows look very dark for me as well. 

lloydj14

supremedalek925 said:

I like the look of the frosted glass. I am on a PC and I can say the shadows look very dark for me as well. 

Cheers and thank you for confirming about the shadows I will try to adjust the lighting so its clearer.

lloydj14

Spent some time trying to calibrate my monitor, downloaded the official ICC so hopefully what I see match what everyone else sees a bit better. I also adjusted the lighting and tried to lighten the shadows and unfortunately it had no effect on the foliage. I also feel like the shaded area of the house is now too light. I would like to know what others think?

X-One

It's still reading too dark for me. Compared to your reference, the main directional light is still too dim. I don't think the shadowed side is too bright at all yet either. Try taking your screenshot and reference into Photoshop and comparing values between the both. Another thing you could do once you get closer to pinning down your lighting is to use a Colour Correction LUT.

If you're aware, ignore, but if you're not, check it out:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/PostProcessEffects/ColorGrading/

shabba

Can you try and go back to the brightness of this? I'm wondering if you started playing the post game after the initial saturation comment, and then just kept tweaking post/lights until you were too deep into the rabbit hole to come back?

Could you bring it back to this, and just adjust desaturate the albedo's?


lloydj14 said:

Scene progress. Updated lighting a bit more and UVed the mill house to get the block material on it. 

lloydj14

Cheers for the feedback. 

@X-One cheers for the link never actually read the documentation and thanks for the idea. I like the sunset feel I've achieved but I think I've got a bit carried away with the sunset idea in my head and strayed way too far from the concept and its lost the feel of the concept.

@shabba You hit it spot on I think I've been too focused on tweaking the lighting forgot my aim and I will be going back to the original lighting. And with the textures that I've created hopefully shouldn't be too saturated.

lloydj14

So taking a short break from my coursework to do environment stuff so I went back and changed the lighting on the mill house. Still not sure if it right. Also made some minor adjustments to the grass colour. 

Here are the new shots. I think I need to add a few props and details around as it feels really bland at the moment. Also, think I need to try and break up the edge of the thatch. Would love to hear your opinions.



Close up of the materials


As always thank you in advance for any feedback and critique 

lloydj14

Some more progress feels like I'm slowly pulling it all together. Added a few assets to the scene to try and give it a bit more going on. Spent some time looking into combing tiling textures on asset through the shaders rather than in Painter to getter a higher level of detail with lower res 512 textures   I did this for the bridge and a woven basket to try it out and really pleased with the results.

Would love your feedback on the results and also on the overall shots. 




And a old water/storage barrel from last week that I rendered in SP2 just to see what it was like.



Please be as honest and brutal as you want as I really want to push this scene.