[Released] [UE4] Modular Japanese Temple
polycounter lvl 5
This project was started a couple of years ago but stopped due to lack of experience. Then I tried to recreate everything from scratch during the Artstation challenge, but again, I wasn't able to finish it due to personal circumstances. Now I finished my previous project and decided to finally complete this environment.
Update 4.02.20
The project now finally finished.
Update 4.02.20
The project now finally finished.
Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/W2qAAv
Playable demo: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vOXxJHcd9A3z1tZpds2ue8TZNmKweuJt
UE4 Marketplace: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/modular-japanese-temple
Features:
- Environment, inspired by real Japanese temple - Byōdō-in
- Fully dynamic 24-hours lighting
- Global Lighting Controller
- Advanced Light Blueprint
- Modular Universal Material
- Raytracing support
Global Lighting Controller Features:
- Day/night cycle within real-world coordinates.
- Auto-activation of point/spotlights/advanced lights
- Ability to ignore certain lights
- Blending between day/night parameters for Sky Sphere, SkyLight, Directional Light, Atmospheric Fog, Exponential Height Fog, Post Processing Volume
- Can work in the editor via construction script or at runtime
- Trigger blueprint to switch between day/night (useful for making interactive demonstrations to showcase day/night variants of the environment)
- Ability to quickly select a certain time of a day (midnight, morning, evening, etc).
Advanced Light Blueprint Features:
- Light intensity and mesh emissive intensity blending during day/night cycle transitions
- Ability to set mesh representation of a light
- Light flickering for mesh emissive and light function
- Wind simulation to make meshes looks lively
- Physics Constraint and Cable Component support - visible connect lights to surface and affect its movement by physics
- Lots of parameters to tune for both light and mesh
- Quickly change from point light to spotlight or mesh emissive only lighting.
- You can use the float curve to set custom transition speed between day/night
- Ability to set custom time intervals for day/night transitions.
- You can disable certain advanced lights from managing them by the global lighting controller.
Universal Material Features:
- One material to rule them all. It can be used for almost any kind of purpose - trim sheets, tileable materials, unique materials for props, grass/trees/foliage, subsurface, glass, etc.
- Enable only those features per instance material, which you need via static switch parameters - unused parts won't be compiled and it will reduce the number of instructions.
- Modular approach. Reuse parts of this material in your custom materials.
- Surface effects support. Add procedural snow/sand/mud/wetness/dissolve effects for your meshes or enhance the system to add your effects.
- Parallax Occlusion Mapping support
- Tesselation support
- World Aligned / Custom Triplanar mapping support.
- Various color variation methods support (SpeedTree/Global Variation Map)
- ScratchGrime masks support
- Translucent materials with refraction support
- Cheaper glass materials via masked blend mode and dither temporal AA.
- Fuzzy shading support. Take most of your moss materials.
- Details normal support
- Various methods to control the normal intensity
- Ability to use separate tiling amount per each input
- Emissive effects - flickering/dynamic fade
- You can be able to not use any textures at all - just pure input scalar/vector values
- Distance-Based Tesselation
- Ability to use separate far tiling value based on camera distance
- Wind support
- Pixel Depth Offset support
- The project also included separate material that supports vertex paint with 3 layers + liquid. You can select default lerp or height lerp to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M7Y8qreAD8
- Environment, inspired by real Japanese temple - Byōdō-in
- Fully dynamic 24-hours lighting
- Global Lighting Controller
- Advanced Light Blueprint
- Modular Universal Material
- Raytracing support
Global Lighting Controller Features:
- Day/night cycle within real-world coordinates.
- Auto-activation of point/spotlights/advanced lights
- Ability to ignore certain lights
- Blending between day/night parameters for Sky Sphere, SkyLight, Directional Light, Atmospheric Fog, Exponential Height Fog, Post Processing Volume
- Can work in the editor via construction script or at runtime
- Trigger blueprint to switch between day/night (useful for making interactive demonstrations to showcase day/night variants of the environment)
- Ability to quickly select a certain time of a day (midnight, morning, evening, etc).
Advanced Light Blueprint Features:
- Light intensity and mesh emissive intensity blending during day/night cycle transitions
- Ability to set mesh representation of a light
- Light flickering for mesh emissive and light function
- Wind simulation to make meshes looks lively
- Physics Constraint and Cable Component support - visible connect lights to surface and affect its movement by physics
- Lots of parameters to tune for both light and mesh
- Quickly change from point light to spotlight or mesh emissive only lighting.
- You can use the float curve to set custom transition speed between day/night
- Ability to set custom time intervals for day/night transitions.
- You can disable certain advanced lights from managing them by the global lighting controller.
Universal Material Features:
- One material to rule them all. It can be used for almost any kind of purpose - trim sheets, tileable materials, unique materials for props, grass/trees/foliage, subsurface, glass, etc.
- Enable only those features per instance material, which you need via static switch parameters - unused parts won't be compiled and it will reduce the number of instructions.
- Modular approach. Reuse parts of this material in your custom materials.
- Surface effects support. Add procedural snow/sand/mud/wetness/dissolve effects for your meshes or enhance the system to add your effects.
- Parallax Occlusion Mapping support
- Tesselation support
- World Aligned / Custom Triplanar mapping support.
- Various color variation methods support (SpeedTree/Global Variation Map)
- ScratchGrime masks support
- Translucent materials with refraction support
- Cheaper glass materials via masked blend mode and dither temporal AA.
- Fuzzy shading support. Take most of your moss materials.
- Details normal support
- Various methods to control the normal intensity
- Ability to use separate tiling amount per each input
- Emissive effects - flickering/dynamic fade
- You can be able to not use any textures at all - just pure input scalar/vector values
- Distance-Based Tesselation
- Ability to use separate far tiling value based on camera distance
- Wind support
- Pixel Depth Offset support
- The project also included separate material that supports vertex paint with 3 layers + liquid. You can select default lerp or height lerp to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M7Y8qreAD8
Replies
Great stuff.
For the last week I worked on a couple of things:
- Resurrected the whole project, which was abandoned since the Artstation Challenge.
- Worked on materials and UV.
- Tried to make it possible to work on this project on 2 different PCs seamlessly.
Trim Sheet for temple fundament was sculpted in ZBrush, baked in Marmoset Toolbag and finally polished in Substance Painter.
I used the AtlasMaker node to make trim sheet for roof details/decals. Good thing is that you can update parts of your trim sheet at any time without a lot of effort. This texture has a 2K resolution and created for 512px/m texel density. I probably pack more decals later in it, when I need them.
Lots of work took UVs, especially for roofs. Very useful addons for UV in Blender is Magic UV, TexTools, Texel Density Checker.
A prototype of this temple is Byōdō-in, but I added some changes in it. Though the main forms are complete, I still not sure about surroundings - walls/water/something else?
Some screenshots from UE4 (all shadows are from Mesh Distance Fields + SSAO - no cascaded shadow maps on images below):
As for seamless work on 2 different PCs, I tried a couple of solutions.
First of all, I tried SyncThing. In the beginning, I used 2 PC + Mobile Phone for sync files. Then I tried to use Raspberry Pi 3 Model B instead of the smartphone to make it work 24/7. I also tried to use my own relay on VPS. It worked fine for small files, but pretty unstable if you need to sync 1-2 Gb every day - sometimes sync could take 1-2 hours.
Then I moved to usual cloud providers and currently testing this solution. The main idea to enable sync only when you need it and disable it when you're working on a project. The reason for this is because unlike SyncThing, most cloud storage providers are not supporting delta sync (except Dropbox maybe, but it's too expensive) and ability to exclude subfolders from sync (not even Dropbox).
What's new:
Global lighting controller improvements, including:
Also, need a jump pad on the end there, ala The Longest Yard.
In the original old version (which is not in Hawai, but in Japan), it's wasn't painted initially.
But then it became painted too:
What's new:
HLODs is really a good way to optimize modular environments non-destructively.
I wanted to add it to my scene, but it looks like things are more complex than I thought.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/feedback-for-epic/99445-bring-back-the-lens-flare-editor
https://www.everspace.game/news/2019/10/behind-the-scenes-1-lens-flares/
What's new:
- Moved to UE 4.24 due to the new Sky Atmosphere, which makes evening lighting much better.
- Added volumetric fog support
- Global Lighting Controller now supports Post-Processing volume updates
- New meshes here and there and improvements on old meshes (for example, top of the main roof now is curved)
Almost done. But I guess I still have 2 weeks for further polishing due to holidays.
Images available on Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/W2qAAv
Playable demo: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vOXxJHcd9A3z1tZpds2ue8TZNmKweuJt
UE4 Marketplace: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/modular-japanese-temple
Video: