[CE] moon surface

mschaika

Hello everybody,

I've been working on this cryengine side project for quite some time now and recently found the time to do some updates on it. I create more rocks, terrain materials, did some more work on the terrain painting and tweaked the lighting a bit.
Looking forward to critics and comments

Deforges

great work, really looks great. what was the process for creating this?

Bek

Very cool. The moon is criminally underutilized as an environment; it seems like such a sweet landscape to explore. Out of curiosity are you using displacement even for the smallest surface details? It looks like even the tiny bumps cast shadows; I'm not that familiar with cryengine though so maybe that's a silly question.

The only crit I can offer is some of the large rocks have a noticeable transition/ sharp line where they meet the terrain surface; some sort of blend between the two materials might help there. But again not too familiar with env / cryengine stuff myself.

mschaika

First of all thanks for the comments

@Deforges:
I sculped the terrain by hand since it is not too complicated. Terrain textures were done in world machine and substance designer. the rocks were done in 3dsmax and zbrush. I baked down a unique normalmap for the large rocks and used tileable rock textures for close up details.

@Bek:
I use POM for all terrain materials. A lot of the smaller stones on the ground have been placed as vegetation. So they are actual geometry. Luckily, cryengine can render a lot of it They disappear after a few meters though.
Thanks for the hint about the terrain to model transitions! Cryengine doesn't offer a shader sollution for this issue yet. So I will most likely spend some time on placing a few deferred decals at the end to cover up the most obvious lines. I'll do that once I'm happy with the overall look and position of the rocks

AlexCatMasterSupreme

Nice!

codyaq2

Throw a space dude in there, might get nice to get a bit more sense of scale, looking awesome.

mschaika

Thanks everybody!
@codyaq2: I'll do a proper first person "moonwalk" soon. I hope it'll help to get a better sense of scale

Shyralon

This looks great, I love how much atmosphere the siplicity of colors creates!
How many types of rocks are you using in addition to the terrain?

Crazy_pixel

Really nice, this looks like the reality. 

mschaika

@Shyralon: I made 4 large rocks, 6 medium sized rocks and 7 small ones. They are fully closed and have different visual features on each side so I can freely rotate them.

Jaggar

Really very good details, I never had the opportunity to work on CE, how big is your texture of the detail? Is it just a normal map? I would like to see in this enviro, a wheeled vehicle driving one wheel on a larger stone
Good job !

mschaika

@Jaggar: Thanks, I'm glad you like it
The textures have a density of roughly 1024px per meter. Most textures are 2k. Since I scale a lot of the rocks I do suffer from some more lower res areas. I don't have a shader set up yet that scales the detail map according to the object scale. All materials use a normalmap some of them also use POM (mostly terrain)

S-ed

I like the look. I have some doubts regarding material Roughness. It should be almost 100% rough from my knowledge of moon rocks. With exception of large rocks that were melted due impact (but those also rough on the surface due to dust). Plus, some random bokeh spots against sun streaks. There are no gasses or dust particles. Nothing would diffuse light. You probably know that sun in space looks like white circle ("like someone drilled a hole in a black canvas"). Sun streaks exist tho, thanks to lens imperfections and diffraction.
No offense, all is IMHO.

mschaika

@S-ed: Thanks for your feedback I actually agree to most of your points. I usually try to make this virtual version of the moon as authentic as possible but sometimes I take the freedom to bend reality a little bit to get a more interesting picture You could argue, that the glow around the sun is caused by regolyth dust that is falling down to the surface after the impact of a micro meteroid

Maximum-Dev

Had an eye on this project since long time ago. Very nice lighting.
What's the size of the area you're working on?

mschaika

@Maximum-Dev: Thanks man! The size of the area is roughly 1km x 1km