[WIP] Medieval environment scene attempt in UE4
polycounter lvl 5
Hello everyone on this forum! It's the first time I publish my WIP here, though I visit this forum regularly and it's a pleasure to I think it can motivate me progress faster, and ask for your help, because any advise on this stage you can provide me with will be appreciated.
I decided to make an environment scene for my portfolio in my spare time. First I intended to create only a middle-aged street scene, but then the scales grew, and I wanted to fill the empty spaces with some placeholder objects, and little by little I came to what you can see on my screenshots.
The goals I set for this scene for myself were, among others:
1. Learn to create textures in Substance Designer from scratch.
2. Make most use of tileable textures: all the objects here share the same basic textures I created in SD, no unique textures at all. Combined with vertex colors and decals, but not unique unwraps.
3. Dive into Unreal Engine deeper than barely importing the textures and setting up basic materials. (I mean environment creation and landscape editing, light and post-effects setup, maybe even adding some FX later, and understanding the hardships I can stumble upon when working on a large scene).
4. Trying to combine a bunch of assets into a complete environment scene (I haven't had much experience of creating complete scenes before)
Comments and crits are more than welcome now.
When I started the work I did not rely on any specific reference, and I see my first mistake here. I can not clarify now to which period I want my scene to refer to, and what details can I add to make it look habited and alive.
There also are some questions concerning work in UE4.
1. Is there any way to mix textures on the landscape? Tileable landscape textures are cool from close distances, but looking at them from far you can spot the tiling, and I do not know how to avoid it. I'd prefer to make a single painted unique 4k texture for distant landscape, which will blend into detail textures when approaching closer, but I do not know how it is possible in Unreal.
2. When I created the objects as low poly chunks separated by IDs, I noticed that using these basic mats is truly not enough, and the objects lack sculpted details and chipped angles and so on. I imagine the following solution to this: I sculpt the objects in the ZBrush, and bake normals to some separate UV channel with unique unwrap, and then the unique baked normal map somehow can overlay the tiled normals of the pre-applied tiling materials. I know that UE reserves UV0 channel for the textures unwrap and UV1 for lightmaps, so the question is - to which channel should I bake the unique normal map, and how to make it work in the material window? Is it possible? The best way is to make each pot and table uniquely unwrapped but I suppose it's not suitable in terms of real production for the sake of better performance.
So that's pretty all for now, you can see the assets here are more of temporary "greyboxes", but I iteratively improve them as I proceed with overall modeling. Please let me know if what you saw here is too large piece for me to swallow yet, or I can do something with it. Thank you for your attention.
I decided to make an environment scene for my portfolio in my spare time. First I intended to create only a middle-aged street scene, but then the scales grew, and I wanted to fill the empty spaces with some placeholder objects, and little by little I came to what you can see on my screenshots.
The goals I set for this scene for myself were, among others:
1. Learn to create textures in Substance Designer from scratch.
2. Make most use of tileable textures: all the objects here share the same basic textures I created in SD, no unique textures at all. Combined with vertex colors and decals, but not unique unwraps.
3. Dive into Unreal Engine deeper than barely importing the textures and setting up basic materials. (I mean environment creation and landscape editing, light and post-effects setup, maybe even adding some FX later, and understanding the hardships I can stumble upon when working on a large scene).
4. Trying to combine a bunch of assets into a complete environment scene (I haven't had much experience of creating complete scenes before)
Comments and crits are more than welcome now.
When I started the work I did not rely on any specific reference, and I see my first mistake here. I can not clarify now to which period I want my scene to refer to, and what details can I add to make it look habited and alive.
There also are some questions concerning work in UE4.
1. Is there any way to mix textures on the landscape? Tileable landscape textures are cool from close distances, but looking at them from far you can spot the tiling, and I do not know how to avoid it. I'd prefer to make a single painted unique 4k texture for distant landscape, which will blend into detail textures when approaching closer, but I do not know how it is possible in Unreal.
2. When I created the objects as low poly chunks separated by IDs, I noticed that using these basic mats is truly not enough, and the objects lack sculpted details and chipped angles and so on. I imagine the following solution to this: I sculpt the objects in the ZBrush, and bake normals to some separate UV channel with unique unwrap, and then the unique baked normal map somehow can overlay the tiled normals of the pre-applied tiling materials. I know that UE reserves UV0 channel for the textures unwrap and UV1 for lightmaps, so the question is - to which channel should I bake the unique normal map, and how to make it work in the material window? Is it possible? The best way is to make each pot and table uniquely unwrapped but I suppose it's not suitable in terms of real production for the sake of better performance.
So that's pretty all for now, you can see the assets here are more of temporary "greyboxes", but I iteratively improve them as I proceed with overall modeling. Please let me know if what you saw here is too large piece for me to swallow yet, or I can do something with it. Thank you for your attention.
Replies
Do small environments, learn something then use the new skills to make another one, making to big stuff ist just frustrating.