The Forest Tree, Unreal Engine 4 Environment

Baewii

Hello everyone !

I just finished this project for an art test, and I wanted to share my results. I had to start from a quick concept art that I could adapt in my own style, so I chose PBR rendering, since I want to improve in this category. The entire scene had to be 10k tris maximum, 1K textures and had to be rendered in a game engine. I chose UE4 since it is SO powerful and I could play a bit with camera settings, and I am pretty happy how it turned out ! For this project I used :
- SpeedTree for the tree
- Zbrush for the ground and wall texture
- Substance B2M for the everything else.

Feel free to give some feedback if there is something that you like or don't like, it will always be useful ^^

Cheers !

Ashervisalis

Hey, I've got a few critiques;

- Biggest critique needs to be the leaf cards. They stand out as super flat and obvious, and look really weird. Did you have a reference for this kind of tree? The branches of the tree don't come to a point, and are pretty thick at the end, and then the leaf cards look a bit randomly placed.
- I'm wondering how much of the texturing is your work. Did you sculpt the bark or is the bark all in the B2M stuff you downloaded? I guess if the studio is using something like B2M or Megascans, it wouldn't really be important, but I feel they will have told you it would be fine in the art test instructions?
- The flowers and are so evenly spread out and uniform it makes the scene odd and unnatural. I feel if you had clumped them together in areas it would have made their addition more interesting. They're also generally all the same height.
- The fern placement is also kind of uninteresting. Did you use a reference for a forest floor? I think you could have also added some polys to the ferns to give them gravity.
- A non perfect circle wall would have been great and added a point of interest. Maybe at one spot, the wall would have fallen down.
- The ground looks super even, and it would have been interesting if it wasn't.

I think you did a good job on the silhouette of the tree, and the stone texture of the wall looks pretty good!

Baewii

Hi, thanks for the feedback ! I am going to make some change, especially the fern and leaves. Unfortunately for the sake of the art test, I couldn't go any higher than 10k triangles, so I had to cut a lot of polys everywhere. But for the portfolio render, I will make something more refined.
Good idea for the floor, I will add a bit of height, maybe try displacement for the floor.
For the tree yeah I had the reference they gave me which was a 2D concept. They didn't have much contrainsts but I had to stick to the concept, I could adapt it on my own style but I wanted to keep the original shape which is this one. But I will add more foliage and place them better to have something more realistic. For the tree bark, I didn't download the texture in a library, I made the base color in photoshop, and I used B2M to transform it and have the maps how I wanted, this is indeed a material that I created ^^ In the art test they were very specific on how everything needed to be made exclusively for the art test, so I started from scratch with every assets and textures.

I'll try to post something tomorrow, thanks again !

Baewii

Hi !

I made some changes since last version :
- Improved foliages on the tree and new roots
- More polys on ferns
- Better fern and flower placement ( more foliage, and less randomly placed )
- Destroyed wall

Let me know what you think !

Ashervisalis

I think it looks miles better now. A few things I'd suggest;
- Did you turn down the roughness for the bark? It looks a bit shinier than in the first few pictures. If not, it must just be the angle of the light.
- Regarding the first picture, I'd rotate the camera around the island to the right, maybe have the start of the wall line up with the center of the tree.
- There's something off about the lighting. Did you make a lot of changes to post processing? I preferred it more before.

The plant placement looks tons better now, and the leaf cards are a lot less noticeable! Good job

Baewii

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it

For the wall it's no problem, I can rotate it a bit more. I didn't make any changes about the texture nor about the light, but since I didn't save my camera angles ( which is dumb ) I had to make them approximately again, so indeed some angles and appertures are different.
I think this has to be about red in the post process which seems a bit stronger in the new photos, might want to look at it again. I believe the biggest change is that there is occlusion on the ferns now, which I didn't have before. They are more integrated but much darker now. But I had a problem baking the tree, in the precedent version the trunk baked but not the leaves, and when I baked with the new version everything was extremely dark, so I did not make a lot of changes on this since I didn't want to destroy everything -__-

Ashervisalis

This art test was for a job, yeah? You'll have to let us know if you get it! Best of luck.

Baewii

Thanks you very much, unfortunately they just told me that they hired someone 3 weeks ago already, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Was a good exercise though