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(UE4) Teaching an old dog new tricks! Landscape studies

ArtfulRunner
polycounter lvl 7
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ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
Howdy folks! 

TLDR: Im a hard surface person and want to learn to make my own trees... any help is welcome along the way!

I have lurked around these forums for many years and am excited to jump in and be a contributing member of the community here at Polycount! Short introduction first... Im a Senior Environment Artist with a little over 10 years experience in the games industry and have spent the majority of that time being more hard surface and world building oriented and never really got too much of a chance to make my own foliage or trees and have always been a little jealous of those who are really good at it. So Id like to learn how to do that myself and take this as an opportunity to rebuild my portfolio with more dynamic content.

To start I wanted to make a series of landscape vignettes from various biomes from the American West using landscape paintings from the 19th century (mostly) as reference. I hope to document my journey as I go and receive tips, pointers and of course awesome critique from all  you fine folks! 

First up will be a couple of Texas scenes. Im from Texas originally and thought this endeavor might have a little more gradual slope if i started with something I knew well. Currently I have most of my preliminary assets made as well as master shaders for my trees and foliage. This scene is just a neutral scene for color correcting textures and learning how to get my foliage to read properly in engine. 

Below is a first shot of my test scene. Ill post more coming up real soon with further explanation of what Ive done and where I am headed next.


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  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    Here a couple more shots of my test scene in Unreal. I used speed tree to make the trees myself by first making clusters and then using fronds to distribute them across the tree. I used the same technique for the bushes as well, I feel like the frond method versus using the leaf generator felt like I had more control over the results. For the bushes I further optimized them in 3ds max. The bluebonnets and their individual LODs were made in 3ds max and then I used speedtree to make them into clumps. The grass was done similar to the bluebonnets as well. I used megascans for some source . Though not in a grab it and use it kind of way. I used various images to cobble my own atlas together or used a source leaf in the process of making a cluster texture in speedtree ..if that makes sense. Im not happy with the trees and would like to spend some more time cleaning those up in the near future. Esp now that Im beginning to better understand how to use curves and parent curves inside speedtree. 
  • TheGabmeister
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    TheGabmeister interpolator
    Lookin great. Been wanting to study foliage as well. What's your lighting setup for this scene?
  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    Thanks so much Gabmeister! Right now its pretty straight forward with a baked skylight and dynamic light set to movable. Im doing a couple of things that are maybe not great and Ive honestly been fighting against a little. I have contact shadows enabled and they really are a bit strong and I don't think I will need them once I get some shader stuff added to my ground foliage to fake some stuff as going forward Ill most likely be nuking all the actual shadows for them so that my diff  scenes performance is in line with current gen. I also am using a small ambient cube in the post. The new tonemapper stuff with the newer versions of UE4 has thrown me just a little. Everything is super punchy and contrasty which is why I used the cube. Brought out the shadows some with out having to adjust the contrast of the scene as a whole plus has the added bonus of tint!
  • DonSmith
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    DonSmith polycounter lvl 6
    I've been making trees and rocks and grass most of my career, and I am impressed with the results you're getting.  Thanks for writing this all up.  Would be curious to know some technical specs for the trees and what your current frame rate is (understanding you're working to make it more optimized .)  Some shader complexity view would be cool to see as well.

    Cheers!
  • Jack M.
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    Jack M. interpolator
    Really nice work. I'm loving how soft the shading is. The quality of the foliage is top notch too. 

    If you're planning on fleshing out the scene a bit more, I'd suggest adding some more variety to the grasses and flowers. For example some other colors of flowers, and maybe some tall weeds, narrow bushes, etc. In any case, keep it up. This is some really nice work.
  • Ashervisalis
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    Ashervisalis grand marshal polycounter
    This makes me want to go for a walk in the countryside :p Looks great.
  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    @Jack M. Thank you for the kinds words! And that great idea on adding variation to the grass. I think I have a good idea on how to accomplish it by sampling the landscape texture plus tiling a subtle noise over world space but I haven't tried it out just yet! Hopefully soon!

    @DonSmith Thank you so much! Sorry for the delay in responding. I thought it would be bad... but not as bad as it turned out...oof! Good news is I think i have it sorted out now. Images to follow!

    @Ashervisalis Thank you! I would literally spend all day outside myself if it were possible... one of the reasons Im so excited to learn foliage.

    Thought I would start off by sharing an image that I forgot to upload last time and then move on to new stuff and show the update to performance as well. Important to note that I did not create the water shader. Its a part of the free water material shaders on the Marketplace.
  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    And now to show the shader complexity.... ooooof. Its the stuff of nightmares really
  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    Thats really bad. So I decided to take another crack at it. This is a part of a new scene but I will be using these new meshes as the base for all my grass type foliage going forward . Here I have addressed this issue and started work on my auto landscape material. If any one is interested I stumbled across a article on 80 level that helped a lot... Ill paste the link below. Honestly Im a little embarrassed... it was kind of doh I should be well aware that of type situation.

    https://80.lv/articles/creating-next-gen-grass-in-ue4/

    This image basically represents beginning parts of my efforts to learn world creator, set up and fine tune my own auto landscape material, and optimization of my grass meshes.




  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    Im going to try my best to post all of this in the order that I did it. Hope it isnt confusing....

    Basically when I saw how bad the shader complexity was on my original scene I knew straight away I would need to re-do it completely..,at minimum the grass. Since that was the fact and I wasn't super pleased with my landscape textures I had generated in Quixel. I decided to take a step back and approach this a little slower. So instead of just focusing on speed tree and making cool outdoor environments I wanted to add a couple of additional pieces of software to my list o' learning. So I have started the effort to learn substance designer (shame on me for waiting this long) and also World creator. Though that has since shifted to world machine recently. 

    The previous image is my first attempt  at creating a landscape in world creator and then importing and setting up in Unreal.

    Below is a quick run through of some of my substance experiments I did to generate the landscape textures I'm using in this scene. I have tried to order them from my first (really bad) experiments to newer ones that are closer to what I am using in my scene currently.

    Hopefully when I get through all of this I can break this stuff down and show more in depth what I have done. But its a little much to get through right now.

    Also please feel free to rip me apart. Its the best way to learn!
  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    I unfortunately dont quite yet have pretty renders of my final textures yet for crit. Hopefully soon though. But I can share what I did for the grass terrain texture.  Basically here I wanted something that looked good at a distance and helped mask the fact that the grass meshes dont occlude every square inch of the terrain up close.
  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    From here I started making some flowers in an attempt to start to regrow my kit out that I'll use. I made the flowers in Designer as fully procedural as well as my basic grass atlas. I have not yet accounted for all the different grass variations I had previously just yet. I wanted to get everything working first and try to keep it simple. Here are the first results of these efforts.

    This last one is a little inconsistent. I tried taking these screens as I did my work so lighting and various other elements will change from image to image. Sorry!


  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    From there I moved to learning how to set up procedural tree volumes in UE4 and started working towards building out a new scene that is more fleshed out. More images to follow!

  • Kaine123
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    Kaine123 polycounter lvl 10
    given the method that you're using, are you able to have decent framerate given how much the grass is extending into the distance? im curious about how big the individual grass clusters are, and how far the cutoff for the grass is
  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    Hey @Kaine123! Right now I get about  35-40 fps in PIE. There's a dip there obviously when you try and use PIE as a performance metric and I have a beat up machine. Its def still a work in progress for sure. I think I can continue to slim things down and bring in the draw distance on my furthest grass cluster. I could also stand to edit down my lods that sit at a distance. 

    My set up in the above scene is 4 different grass clusters of the same "type" (all I mean by that is I have them on the same sheet). But I have constructed each cluster differently based on relative position to the camera.So my main cluster that extends the furthest.... which is 20,000 unreal units ( which is deceiving in its self because I am using the per instance node in the shader to keep the grass from culling in a straight line...it begins culling sooner) sits in at about 500 tris on LOD0 and 200 in its last. I dont use billboards because of overdraw. This cluster is about 1.5 meters  by 1.5. Next I have what I call my actual main cluster. Its of the same radius but has more triangles. Its LOD0 sits at about 800. I wanted extra geo for how I intend on implementing the wind...its also why they are all still pretty straight. Hopefully that wont look so bad in the future. These have about half the cull distance of the first but is denser. Then I have two "filler" clusters. These are really cheap. No more than 300 triangles in lod0, But they take up less space at half the radius. I could easily get by in this scene with just one of these but I wanted it for the future for colorization purposes. They are half the height of the other clusters as well. These get packed in dense in the foreground but cull really quickly. I dont remember the exact number off hand but its not much more than 10 meters out from the player camera. Basically I was hoping to just fill in the immediate space around the camera to make it feel dense like it would in a field. Without the close up filler it feels gamey. And the rest is just trying to blend in the grass atlas diffuse with the grass terrain texture so that you dont notice it going away in the distance. This too is why I felt it was most important for my grass terrain texture to read well at a distance. If you look at that last image and look and the first bush cluster to the right you can actually see where its just the cheap instances and they are pretty spaced out and arent quite matched up right. Im hoping that when I blend in my landscape tex that they will blend better.

    Sorry for the wall of text dude... I can be so wordy :). Hope that makes sense. Hopefully when its all ironed out I can post up a breakdown!
  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    Here are a couple more images from my scene as it progresses...


  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    From here I have started to mess around with what I might want the scene to be in the end. I went into this new scene pretty much open. I just wanted to get certain things working properly and ultimately start fleshing out a landscape eco system that i could just swap out assets and cut down on the time to create images for my portfolio. Currently this scene just has trees from my Texas scene but I think this would be a good opportunity to make a pine tree and a different broad leaf tree... re-enforcing (hopefully...lol) what i have learned so far.

    That being said I do want this scene to turn into something more that just a test. So I started experimenting with some ideas in a duplicate scene. Basically making myself a concept of sorts so that I start narrowing down what this will be. No the ideal way to plan a scene! But I am starting to get a clearer idea now.

    In the following images i did not make the mountain mesh or the architecture. They are from some random things I have from the asset store. Im basically just treating them as fancy blocking meshes while I sort out what I'd like this to turn into.

    Some of the images will contain characters that are not mine. They are a part of the free Paragon characters you can get from the marketplace. I just feel like landscapes feel abstract and it helps me to put it into game context.
  • ArtfulRunner
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    ArtfulRunner polycounter lvl 7
    Just messing around with some ideas... Paragon characters as mentioned before




  • Kaine123
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    Kaine123 polycounter lvl 10
    (For some reason polycount is letting me quote your reply to me?) 

    Don't worry about the long post. That was really useful information and I appreciate it! 
  • sacboi
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    sacboi high dynamic range
    Very informative, thanks for sharing. I'm kind of in the same boat, as my core skillset is mechanical hard surface and recently decided too dip a toe or three into enviro water's. Dang talk about steep curve but lol this old dog will hopefully pick up a few tricks along the way as well, so cheers I'm duly subscribed keeping an eye on your continued progress.
  • Shirk
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    Shirk greentooth
    Im assuming you arent using any billboards for your trees? What are you doing about the vert cost at a distance? Overdraw for billboards at a distance with a small pixel count will be many times less expensive than high vert count on the trees at the same distance (since vert count is constant aside from LODs, but overdraw is pixel based). The trees look fantastic, but I am curious to know what they would look like in a game setting. 
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