[UE4] Outdoor environment "Wind Mills"
polycounter lvl 9
Hello everyone!
I wish I had the courage to posted the W.I.P threads but I recently just wrapped up a project I've been working on for 3 months.
Artstation post:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0XxdLK
Wanted to challenge myself with actually completing something to compliment the last year or two of mindless dead projects. Saw "Wind Mills" by Raphael Lacoste and decided I wanted to use it as a concept for a project
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xl9Xm
Two biggest things in this project for me was learning how to setup foliage in a open scene,
and setting up a skybox or clouds as I've never done either of those before!
Outside of the grass all assets and textures were made by myself in Blender and the Substance Suite. The buildings are a mix of a pretty basic tiling texture and a trimsheet made in substance designer. I was going to add more detail to the texture, but somehow the detail got lost with distance. I'm not quite sure how to handle that yet.
The grass is Megascans (meadow pack).
I decided not to create original foliage in this project so I can assure I understood how to have a decent material setup foliage in UE4. Picked up a lot of knowledge in regards to LODs and ended up trashing the default LODs that came with the megascan and substitute it with my own.
My next step will definitely be learning how to create my own original assets in regards to vegetation. I consider myself a more hardsurface artist up until this point, so it was a fun and frustrating learning something new for sure!
I'm not smart enough to know how to do ray-marched/volumetric clouds so I relied on simple cards for this scene.
The clouds were greyscale for the base diffuse multiplied by a color in the UE4 material.
It was a bit tedious having to change the color everytime I updated the lighting in the scene.
UE4 exponential height fog did a lot of work to selling the depth.
I masked a couple of areas in in separate channels and applied the color in UE4 including emissive areas to help fake rimlight through the height fog. Turns out most detail came from this and the alpha masking!
(top left image shows the base grey-scale when first imported, without the material applied)
Honestly I wanted to keep going but I started getting burned out and decided I had to stop somewhere and actually submit something for once.
Unfortunately I think i'll wrap this one up for now but would love to hear some input on the many ways I could have improved this scene! Kind of shot myself in the foot for not having a W.I.P thread.
I wish I had the courage to posted the W.I.P threads but I recently just wrapped up a project I've been working on for 3 months.
Artstation post:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0XxdLK
Wanted to challenge myself with actually completing something to compliment the last year or two of mindless dead projects. Saw "Wind Mills" by Raphael Lacoste and decided I wanted to use it as a concept for a project
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xl9Xm
Two biggest things in this project for me was learning how to setup foliage in a open scene,
and setting up a skybox or clouds as I've never done either of those before!
Outside of the grass all assets and textures were made by myself in Blender and the Substance Suite. The buildings are a mix of a pretty basic tiling texture and a trimsheet made in substance designer. I was going to add more detail to the texture, but somehow the detail got lost with distance. I'm not quite sure how to handle that yet.
The grass is Megascans (meadow pack).
I decided not to create original foliage in this project so I can assure I understood how to have a decent material setup foliage in UE4. Picked up a lot of knowledge in regards to LODs and ended up trashing the default LODs that came with the megascan and substitute it with my own.
My next step will definitely be learning how to create my own original assets in regards to vegetation. I consider myself a more hardsurface artist up until this point, so it was a fun and frustrating learning something new for sure!
I'm not smart enough to know how to do ray-marched/volumetric clouds so I relied on simple cards for this scene.
The clouds were greyscale for the base diffuse multiplied by a color in the UE4 material.
It was a bit tedious having to change the color everytime I updated the lighting in the scene.
UE4 exponential height fog did a lot of work to selling the depth.
I masked a couple of areas in in separate channels and applied the color in UE4 including emissive areas to help fake rimlight through the height fog. Turns out most detail came from this and the alpha masking!
(top left image shows the base grey-scale when first imported, without the material applied)
Honestly I wanted to keep going but I started getting burned out and decided I had to stop somewhere and actually submit something for once.
Unfortunately I think i'll wrap this one up for now but would love to hear some input on the many ways I could have improved this scene! Kind of shot myself in the foot for not having a W.I.P thread.
Replies
Yeah I definitely agree with the shadows. Had some struggle with the distance field shadow offset, some really strange trade-offs for buildings in the distance. I'm assuming I didn't have the correct bias set.
It might also be the way I constructed the meshes so I need to do more experiments with them.
To be honest, up until this point I've only used baked lighting and this was my first environment with dynamic lighting/movable lights! Much to learn.
However, this technique could probably prove useful later. Its also insanely cheap.