[WIP] Creating fantasy town and surrounding landscape

ChromedDragon

I am hoping to create a medieval fantasy style town and surrounding landscape in unreal engine. I created the landscape in Worldmachine and  used a procedurally texturing material to texture it based on incline. I also created a system of modular pieces to create these early versions of the houses.
All feedback is appreciated, and I will be updating regularly.

Alex_J

A tip in case you don't know: you can export the flow mask from world machine and use that in your splat map. Can give some nice results compared to only using height/slope detection alone.

ChromedDragon

I've been looking at grass population of a landscape and was wondering if anyone had any useful advice on the subject.

jrigaldies

Is there anything in particular that you're struggling with in terms of foliage? 

I would be mindful of draw/cull distance with densely populated grass over larger areas. Another thing that can be useful for performance improvements is using low end shaders on distant foliage billboards. Your lod0 - 2 can be more complex, but that can depend on your goals. Your third grass shot looks like a vast improvement from the first two. 

I'd also be interested to see how your houses progress. 

ChromedDragon

Yeah I was wondering if there was any solutions to the clear circle of grass (the draw distance). I tried to change the colour and the roughness of the landscape material to more closely match the grass billboards, but was wondering if there was a way to incrementally phase out the grass objects as it they approached the draw limit.

This is how the houses are looking now, I assembled them from a set of modular asset I created.

ChromedDragon

I was able to fix the render distance grass issue by creating some extra grass LOD's which used a higher opacity as distance increased. 

The next issue I'm looking into is trying to find a unifying texture style that helps all the props feel like part of a cohesive set.

jrigaldies

The grass on that middle frame looks best. The foreground grass on the third frame is a different color from the background grass, which looks odd. I think a good next step is to add some foliage variation (flowers, shrubs, etc) and you'll be set. But be careful not to overdo it, as adding all kinds of meshes with different colors can become messy/noisy. 

For prop textures, consider the scene's theme, scale, as well as your texture sources (are they photoscans or handpainted). And think about color and lighting. Look around for any and all references you can find; you should always have some kind of "mood/vision board" type thing to constantly go back to. Real world photos are great, but other artists' scenes and game levels can also be a huge help to realize how things translate into digital space. 

As for those crates, the left texture is better if you're attempting a more photoreal style, but I would slightly lower the color brightness and see how that looks.