Savanna Environment
polycounter lvl 5
Hello artists,
This is my first attempt at creating an environment in Unreal Engine 4 for my portfolio.
I'm looking for all round critique: from the raw composition to the sunset atmosphere I'm going for, to any individual details that might compromise the scene.
I've made a list of things I can spot at this stage but wanted some professional/experienced eyes on the still.
Many thanks.
This is my first attempt at creating an environment in Unreal Engine 4 for my portfolio.
I'm looking for all round critique: from the raw composition to the sunset atmosphere I'm going for, to any individual details that might compromise the scene.
I've made a list of things I can spot at this stage but wanted some professional/experienced eyes on the still.
Many thanks.
Replies
As far as I've seen, nobody is making more stunning, realistic environments than these guys.
Hi Peter, thank you for the feedback. I've adjusted the fog which was washing out the scene and am playing around with the sky sphere to find that rich orange sky. When you say "give your scene more life", what would you recommend? More animal assets? A higher variety of foliage?
Hi Big! Thanks for the link, I've taken reference screenshots from the video and this gives me a much better idea of how the landscape should be played upon.
I wonder how they can render all that foliage? I can't seem to run smoothly in UE4 with the entire ground covered in grass, let alone with trees, bushes and long grass. Any optimisation suggestions?
I really couldn't say what their secrets are, or if doing something similar in UE4 is feasible.
Hey all, this is an updated shot and I'm going to render a cinematic flythrough of the scene soon.
Here are the references I've been using:
I used a photo to try and replicate the feel and colours of the scene and a concept by Florian Salomez to loosely base the flatlands on.
Please see the below link for the scene breakdown.
Lightmass keeps crashing when I build the lighting which has postponed this flythrough that I'm trying to accomplish.
https://vimeo.com/289455040
I don't know enough about environment art to comment any further on this really.
One suggestion -- again I don't know that this would be something any pro enviro-guy would agree with or not -- is to consider improving the quality of the foreground tree. It looks like a typical game tree -- necessarily low poly poly; appropriate for mass instantiation across the environment. But in this scene, it's foremost on the screen, so why not make it a hero prop with tesselated bark material and the works?
- As promised. Thank you for all your help and feedback.
Savanna Environment Flythrough [UE4]: https://vimeo.com/290445628
Again thank you for your consistent voice on this thread. It means the world to me!
I enjoyed this a lot -- really great work on the vegeation and riparian microterrain, IMO.
But, there is a few things that stick out to me and make the scene feel kind of off. In the above screenshot, I feel the scale of the mountains is wrong. The shape and rocky texture of these mountains suggest much higher altitudes to my eye, but the size of these mountains in the scene is really nothing more than a significant hill. Perhaps these were supposed to be like, hundreds of miles in the distance, but if that is the case we should see rolling savanna for a long ways before the foothills of the mountains rise up.
Second thing is the sun. This is Africa! We need a gigantic, blazing sun boldly telling the viewer, "Behold, the cradle of life!"
google photo showing a more realistic composition (what I think anyway).
Kilimanjaro. Granted, this is the largest mountain on the continent, but still note the vast distance the camera-person must be from it to capture the entire thing. You get a sense of the scale of the thing from the vast stretch of terrain between the foreground and the mountain.
Hope this helps. Great work!
edit : one last thing. Not sure if you were trying to be perfectly realistic or not, but those are North American buffalo, which AFAIK have never existed on the African continent.
You are 100% correct with all of these things. I made some errors which stop the piece from hitting the realistic benchmark I was going originally going for. I'll forgive myself for my naivety as this was my first play around in UE4.
1. The scale is certainly off and I realised this a little too late. I originally set my landscape to be fairly large and my intention was to have the mountains as background elements. I'd have been better off using a HDRI image for them or increasing the scale further. The problem with the latter is that...
2. The amount of foliage to accurately represent the Savanna was scarily high to the point where I'd be hitting 5fps in the engine. This was using the usual tips and tricks to reduce this (radius spread, paint density, increasing foliage height/scale etc.) To compensate, I ended up tying the foreground closer to the mountains because of this issue so behind the camera is the other 1/2 of the map (above the line in image below and in the circle) completely empty to improve framerate.
This meant cutting the expansive (and foliage dense) rolling Savanna out which reduces the amazing and potential depth of the scene.
3. Ultimately, as an excitable graduate just keen to get going on the portfolio, I've skipped a critical step in the process.
COLLECTING REFERENCES. I had a total of maybe 5 but this obviously wasn't enough. The zebra photo you've posted is a money shot that I would have loved to have hit with my scene!
4. Additionally smaller details let it down. As you mentioned, I got mixed up with bison and buffalo when searching for 3D animal meshes which is why the North American beast is obviously on vacation here
I'd love to revisit this piece in a few years time to give me some time to develop (and hopefully have some industry experience under my belt). It will be called "The Cradle of Life" as you so amazing put it, in honour of your contributions. Thank you once again
About the scale and FPS though... I know you can definitely get that heavy foliage and have long views... I'm not a enviro guy so I don't know all the details of how -- I do know there is simply a limit to how far you can draw detail meshes like grass before it gets too heavy -- but I think with some ingenuity in the way you draw distant terrain you can get that big expansive view and still trick the eye into believing the grass just continues out forever. This is probably a matter of making customized assets (billboards and such) as well as some novel shader work (I knonw of a few landscape shaders but only for Unity engine. No doubt Unreal has some stuff as well, assuming you aren't looking to write your own.)
If you got the time and interest, I'd recommend checking out TheHunter: Call of the Wild. I know most people aren't too interested in hunting games, but just from a standpoint of checking out the environments in that game, it's really worthwhile. Will give you a good idea of just how much stuuff you can pack into a game and have it run well.
additional : For context, I had the same critiques when I played Skyrim back in the day. All of a sudden, gigantic epic snowcapped mountains just appeared out of a forest. Games, of course, have to work within certain limits, and obviously the designers decided they wanted epic mountain environments, even if the geography didn't make perfect sense. I'm sure 99.9% of gamers weren't bothered by this.
Yeah, I did play around with the LOD's and culling distances of all the foliage meshes but this is an area I should work on. I don't know too much about material billboards and how to create them so I'll have to learn that.
I checked The Hunter: Call of the Wild when you first mentioned it in the thread. I took this reference image from the video that you linked!
I suppose games are still a form of entertainment and if gameplay is engaging and fun then most players will suspend belief over real-life accuracy