(UE4) Desert Planet Environment - "First Contact"

Jack M.

I've been working on this environment off and on for the past couple weeks in what little spare time I have and now that I feel I have a solid direction to go in I wanted to post here for feedback and suggestions to further influence the designs.

I'm making a sort of "first contact" environment. The character in the foreground isn't as much of the focus so I'm going to shroud him in a cloak, and I'm going to make a ship that's landed in the distance. 

A lot of stuff is placeholder right now. The rocks, the ship, and the character are all currently placeholder. I'm going to add some light foliage to further act as a natural vignette to the scene to pull the focus to the ship as well. 

I'm also pretty interested in messing with interesting screen ratios in order to achieve different feelings so I'll probably come up with a standard 16:9 and some other comp.

I'm hoping to have a blockout of the ship done here in the next few days.

Jack M.

Had a bit of fun sculpting a rock tonight. Eventually I'll have enough pieces to form a kitbash library and I'll get these rocks replaced.

ZacD

I thought that last image was a giant turd at first. The ship currently gets lost in the composition. 

Jack M.

welp... that can't be unseen. Time to try again, haha.

Jack M.

Cliff rocks

Jack M.

Made some big changes. Much happier with the composition now. Still got a long ways to go though. 

Sebvhe

Looks really solid, and those cliffs are super neat!

Maybe you didn't really go into PostProcessing yet, but I feel you could benefit a lot from having a stronger orange/blue contrast between highlight and shadows. Furthermore, Some of the shadowed sides of the cliffs are quite dark, maybe more global illumination, would help.

The overall scene is really good already!

Jack M.

Thanks @Sebvhe , I appreciate the suggestions. I enabled realtime global illumination, made some post process changes, and slightly altered the composition. I'm definitely getting happier with things, and at this point I think I'm going to get the rocks in game before I get too comfortable looking at these placeholders and then I'll start blocking out the ship.

Makkon

These are some great rock assets, man. Love what I'm seeing so far.

macoll

Really great, beautiful scene, rule of thirds

hmm_rock

Looking really nice, love the atmosphere. The mid-ground cliff is still looking a little dark/over saturated to me, seems like there would be more bounced lighting from the directly lit sand under it, or maybe the albedo itself is a little too dark? It may be nice to break up some of the verticality of the composition between cliff and planet curve all on the right side. I could be interesting to see the bottom curve of the planet at the top of the screen. Great work, looking forward to seeing more!

Jack M.

@Makkon - Thanks man . Definitely need to do some more though to get some good variation.

@macoll  - Thanks. Yep, I found it was the best layout to visually communicate what I was trying to focus on.

@hmm_rock - Much appreciated . I think the albedo is a little dark, but since it's a placeholder rock I'm not going to really mess with it atm until I get my own stuff in there replacing it. The planet location though definitely needs to be moved. Once you mentioned the too much uniform vertical I noticed what you meant right away and now I can't unsee it.

Prylos

The atmospheric diffusion looks awesome and nice rocks.

Jack M.

@Prylos  - Thanks for the kind words

Thanks to @hmm_rock  I think the composition improved a lot. 

Swaggletooth

This is looking really amazing now, I love the way the lighting has turned out!
I was going to say "maybe blend the sand a bit with the rocks" but it looks like @hmm_rock beat me to it.

I_Art_Men

Really awesome  ! I found it really "mars first step". I love the way the contrast between the shadow/light and the planet are blending tohether.

Jaston3D

Looks really good! what are you using for your realtime GI?

Jack M.

I'm just using LPV's. I find it's good enough for most outdoor scenes.

ZeroStrike

I feel like like its an environment out of Star Wars Ep. 2. Pretty awesome. I think it was Tatooine.

Ashervisalis

Nice, I'm digging the vibe. The rock doesn't look like a turd, and it would look excellent once a texture is applied.

Jack M.

So due to time constraints I've decided to not add anymore of my own rocks to this scene indefinitely, while instead I've opted into retexturing a lot of the assets I was using and also creating custom shaders to get a different feel.

As for the primary focal point, I tried many things that just didn't really tell the story I wanted to tell, nor did they look all that interesting. But I finally landed on a sort of black hole that's popped up and is beginning to wreak havok. The character in scene is a native that's stumbled upon the phenomenon. The lightning is unrealistic given the story but I think it adds enough to the composition to warrant the addition.

Pretty much all of the components in this scene are moving in an interesting way except the rocks so I think I might make a blueprint or particle effect for those and make up a video as well at some point.