Megascans, the road to awesomeness!
Hi everyone,
I'm building a small environment purely using Megascans and my intent is to discover:
1. How much time it saves me to use Megascans and Megascans Studio.
2. How far I can go with Megascans.
3. The gain in graphics vs regular textures.
4. How Megascans can help setup an authentic biome.
I'll be posting my work in progress screenshots here and the reason for doing so is to collect your invaluable feedback as your fresh eyes sees things that I can't. My emphasis is to keep an acceptable amount of detail at various distances so I take a lot of close ups too.
Thank you, and the entire Quixel team!
I'm building a small environment purely using Megascans and my intent is to discover:
1. How much time it saves me to use Megascans and Megascans Studio.
2. How far I can go with Megascans.
3. The gain in graphics vs regular textures.
4. How Megascans can help setup an authentic biome.
I'll be posting my work in progress screenshots here and the reason for doing so is to collect your invaluable feedback as your fresh eyes sees things that I can't. My emphasis is to keep an acceptable amount of detail at various distances so I take a lot of close ups too.
Thank you, and the entire Quixel team!
Replies
Created some clovers.
1. Are you doing any creation work from scratch or using everything available in MegaScans and mixing it together to form new creations?
2. What do you think about vegetation creation using manual work + MegaScans. Since a lot of foliage workflows involve modelling over a photograph of a leaf, extruding it and turbosmoothing it before baking it down and using the original image as a base texture / alpha card, do you think using MegaScans to cut out the whole process of modelling over a leaf and turbosmoothing it will eventually become the way to do it?
I'm working on a project with about 5 types of foliage, with the ones that look more 'leafy' in structure I was just thinking about taking some leaf scans from MegaScans and laying them out on some branches in Maya before baking it down for use, to me this isn't really any different from taking a leaf image from google and modelling / extruding over it to use, except with the scan I get all the maps and original highpoly model. Thoughts on this?
Cheers!
Working from scratch... not much. But manual work, yes.
For the ferns and clovers and every other plant I'm simply modeling around the atlases, making lods and done. Compared to creating an atlas from scratch, it saves me so many hours, and yet the result is better since these are scans from the actual plants and no HP bakes. The old way of creating your own HP and baking to atlas is still usable for the type of plants you can't find on the Megascans library, but eventually the library will grow to address most of your needs if not all.
The leaf atlases aren't very useful in the form they are. You need to first lay the leafs on a branch as you said and then again bake that into another atlas, but there are ways to make this process easier in Max or Maya etc. instead of manually placing a leaf everywhere. You can use google images but the advantage here is that you have access to tons of high res leaves that have consistent PBR maps.
I do change the Albedo color here and there though because it's not like you can throw any sort of textures from different locations together and get awesome results. The issue is that leaves and foliage slightly change hue from one location to another depending on the type of weather and the amount of sun light the leaves receive so when you use atlases from different locations and want to put them together in one location you need to adjust the hue on both to match each other closer otherwise they look not so well.
All in all, this saves so much of my time and provides really good quality.
Sorry for late reply. Swamped wit work I am.
Yes everything is optimized, I'm using atlases, and sharing textures here and there a lot, and doing detail mapping to increase the texture resolution, channel packing all textures etc.
Well with PBR materials and physically based-ish lighting yeah they look fine on my other landscapes or any other lighting setup (as long as it's physically based-ish). I'm saying "ish" because currently there's no physical unit support for sun and sky light in UE4, and so we do it the hacky ways.
Likewise any optimizations you make for the export pipeline and/or re-atlasing tweaks - settings would be interesting to see.
Can you also explain further on your statement "because currently there's no physical unit support for sun and sky light in UE4, " and what versions used.
I got swamped with other works but this is something I'm gonna get back to soon. I'm not using Maya, everything is rendered in UE4 with typical lights. For ferns and clovers I used a spot light. I've used a Cine Cam for screenshots with all settings being at their defaults and only adjusting the focus distance. For atlases if I happen to need to combine them I do the cropping in PS.
What I mean't by that is that when you replicate the same surface definitions as in real life using PBR, you also need the same amount of light on your surfaces as in real life for your materials to look realistic. Most other engines have Lux unit for their Sun light which is the measurement unit for Sun intensity in real life so you can just take the intensity from real life charts. But currently Directional light has no units to is so you have to eyeball everything. Not everyone has a really good eye for that and that's when the problem becomes even more apparent.
As for skylight, it's an ambient light that applies uniformly to everywhere in the game world. That's while other engines have moved on to better approaches i.e Cryengine's IBL let's you localize the ambient light which also captures it's surroundings, not just the sky color. Another really good advantage of having it localized like that is that it'll look like as if you have G.I going on. Imagine placing a skylight among your trees and the light would have a green tone. Then placing another skylight on some grey rocks and the light would have a grey tone, exactly as if it's light bounces.
These two issues are currently really hurting when it comes to achieving realism in real time environments in UE4.