(UE4) Teaching an old dog new tricks! Landscape studies
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.
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.
Replies
Cheers!
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.
@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.
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.
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!
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!
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
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.
Don't worry about the long post. That was really useful information and I appreciate it!