[UE4] [Env.] five more minutes
hey guys, I recently finished a piece that started with a friend asking me to make a background for his new mix he was working on, here is a little bit about it:
I had a image on my head by listening to his music on the feel I wanted to translate, so upon researching a bit I found that photo, that inspired me to make this great concept
I have been working on it on my spare time for quite a wile, so you can kinda see from the gif the moments I would jump in with a new idea and get further and further from the original concept, but I think it was for the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQBFCGrfuIsand here are the final shot, with no rain
I also had some spare time wile waiting for my friend to do the final touches on his track, so I played around with making other times of day, for fun, I dont think the composition works as well since the image was built around the idea of the bright lights, but it was a good exercise..
and here is a little breakdown on how the ground was built:
basically on atlas and a couple of decals for the the whole ground, I actually modeled the ground from cubes on MODO and did the sculpting job inside substance painter, really fun workflow, and a lot faster than bringing zbrush just to do some simple wear on the edges.
I wish I had more to share, but I honestly cant think on anything. If you have any suggestion, feedback or questions, I am all ears 
I hope you like it.
Replies
It would be cool to see come shot breaking construction angles if you don't mind showing us the rude bits!
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@Pultz here he is:
I know it does not make much sense, but the idea is that someone put it there to protect the street, see it as a type of gargoyle, lol
@superdroso the ground has 2 UVs, one for the trim texture and one for light map only, stuff like the puddles is handled trough vertex paint, and the manhole, stripes and writing are decals.
@fearian the sky is a blueprint I made, is very similar to the sky BP that comes on Unreal, I just change the way it handles clouds and some other minor stuff. As for the colors I did not use HDRI, the day one for example is pretty much a directional light for the sun, with baked lightmap, cranked up to about 3x trough post process and a movable sky light to fill in the dark places, with a purple tinted ambient occlusion. The night one was a bit more complicated, I stayed quite a wile choosing what I thought was the right colors for each area, and the sunrise one is a mix of both. I also played with the saturation a little bit trough the post process to get the colors where I wanted. As for breaking the scene, I don't mind it, but I am writing a little something about it for 80lv that will show some of it, I will post here when its published, just so I don't have to write it twice :P
please share how you created rain particles and the shader for rain particles.
my advice here is that if you are going to use the "size by speed" that Dean uses here, use a squarish mask instead of round, so it does not look like it is raining needles.
For the animated ripples, I learned here https://deepspacebanana.github.io/deepspacebanana.github.io/blog/shader/art/unreal engine/Rainy-Surface-Shader-Part-1
its all quite limited to what you see on the main shot, as you have probably imagined.
I also forgot to mention there, but most of the lights have a fake glow applied to a plane in front of it, facing the camera, to give a more 2d look, instead of unreal's bloom
Really love it!
if you still have any questions after it, feel free to ask.
here is the wire frame and the height texture for the yellow guy
on some cases where I want more detail on a specific area I add extra cuts there to hold the vertex color better, it was not really the case for this one.