Red Dead-Inspired Portfolio Piece (FINISHED)

knightfallows

Started on an environment piece inspired by Red Dead 2; it is consisting of both an interior piece and exterior piece in one, my goal with this project has been to essentially consolidate everything I've learnt through my masters and build on that.

For context the central idea is that this is a ranch in the middle of nowhere that has just weathered a snow storm, the occupant(s) were in the process of moving out but their wagon breaking down halted that and so they were stuck.

I have so far finished the planning and blockout, ready to now move onto the getting the modularity in.
General feedback and constructive criticism is always welcome but either way I'll be posting my production process in posts to come.

I have an active Miro board you're welcome to look at where I tend to gather all my references and research as well as a Trello and my Artstation if you are interested.

 https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kuRUeA0=/

 https://trello.com/b/rT7gIvYZ/3rd-semester

knightfiasco.artstation.com

Cheers,

knightfallows

Quick update to show some trees I made, including the master material to go along with them.
I'm new to Speedtree and foliage in general so they should hopefully improve over time. Right now the materials used are all Quixel but I will if I get the time take a crack at making my own.

Ashervisalis

Looking cool!

knightfallows

Hey thanks mate,

Another quick update,
While I've been creating all the master materials I'm going to be needing I've done a quick set up for displacement on the tree bark.

I've got a function I'm using with all the materials that controls the tessellation, through it I can control the distance from the camera at which the tessellation stops, as well as its density while in view.


In the material itself the displacement map texture is multiplied by the displacement strength.


Before

After

tomturner

love the shots you've chosen! the last one in particular

knightfallows

New update on the foliage: got some cleaner, better made versions of trees that feel more fitting to the scene than the previous set. I've been getting more comfortable with Speedtree and more willing to experiment outside of the tutorials I've been following.
The biggest change is going to be when I start experiment with snow in Houdini as part of my technical; I want to get actual clumps of snow on the branches and leaves like in this composite I've been using as a reference but that in itself is entirely new grounds so I don't know how long until I show those results.

knightfallows

Been lacking in posts but these past weeks I've been all hands on figuring out substance painter for the props and designer for the tiling textures. I've figured out most of the issues though and am start to make ground again.
Here's some of my prop work;

For the paintings I took them off google images and then layed a slight height and roughness map over them to give the effect they are painted onto the texture.


When it comes to the tiling textures I'm fairly comfortable with designer now, this is my most recent creation

There are still issues aplenty mostly around balancing the how I layer the black and white values in the height map but I'm at the point where I created this without any tutorials so I'm fairly happy with the results.

If you have any feedback or constructive criticism I'm all ears.

JohannesAg

it feels a little strange that all the floor boards are equal length, maybe vary that a little? 

knightfallows

yeah i plan to once the rest of the scene is done start adding in some geo, raise the planks and such and generally distribute the tiling texture. Thanks for the feedback though

knightfallows

My hero assets:


The fireplace was done entirely in Zbrush and then retopoed before being textured while the Wagon was original meant to be tiling textures but I felt it needed to look more interesting than that and so quickly baked the low onto itself and worked from there.

These have both been rendered quickly in Iray at 2048 texture resolution.

knightfallows

Realised it was best to get a final sense of the lighting before I go through and get the last textures and props in. I'm relatively new to lighting with UE so there's been a lot of experimenting.

I'm preferring the wider shots where the house is a smaller part of the bigger picture over it dominating the shot; it helps suggest that idea of isolation which is what I am aiming for.

knightfallows

Quick comparison of the original shot in blockout to what it is now.

knightfallows

Currently doing a first pass on the interior lighting but it's not going as well as the exterior.
Looking for some general feedback or suggests if anyone's got it.
As opposed to the exterior the interior is going to have some baked lighting.

knightfallows

For the most part this project is finished, I want to come back and do some work on the exterior but that will be post-deadline.

My Artstation if you are interested: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Kr1gv4
This has been a great learning experience for me, considering what I knew at the start its a genuine wonder I got this far. Stay tuned as I'll be updating the forum with all the technical stuff in further posts.

Hero Shots

Asset Zoo





Material Presentation



My flythrough.
Youtube has compressed the living shite out of the video so hopefully I'll get around to making a better reupload.
https://youtu.be/WexbcNytpNA

knightfallows

Grunge Pass

Decals

I wanted to used decals to help break up the corners of the interior and introduce some additional grime to specific areas.

To do this I went about scouring Textures.com for different textures I could use that were then put into a photoshop file set to Grayscale as an atlas of sorts. In Maya I took that atlas and cut it out into separate simple plains; I could use the decal system already inside of UE but as far as I’m aware it would project the entire atlas instead of these specific instances.

Inside of UE, I have a material setup for the decals: I didn’t follow a reference for this, it's mostly just me spitballing ideas so I can’t speak to how good it actually is but it worked for me. From there I would create multiple material instances so I could tweak the different decals independently.

Here are the decals in action highlighted in lovely green.

I don’t think my use of decals has been the greatest, it’s definitely where I need to improve but I found looking for how decals are used online and in other people's work is something not a lot of people touch on so it was quite hard to get a frame of reference. Definitely something I’ll be keeping my eye out for in future projects. Exterior-wise is definitely in need of a decal pass to add variation to an otherwise bland scene.

wirrexx

https://youtu.be/ooBaESJCH0o?t=2783 Scene is shaping up mate, look at the way quixel does decals, maybe it can help you in the right direction (not that i think you are going the wrong one)

knightfallows

Hey thanks mate, Quixel videos are actually incredibly good for that kind of stuff I always forget to look back at their videos.

 

Roughness Variation

Next for the grunge pass was a more broader appliance.

I started out by creating a bunch of grunge masks inside of Designer by taking the already existing ones, balancing out their white and black values and then combining them all into one texture map for export.

Inside of UE I made a lot of use from Material Functions because you create them once and then use put them in other materials without the need to keep recreating them.

The set-up for this is quite simple:

·        I have the masks set to be tri-planar with scaling.

·        To allow me to change which masks I am using at a time the RGB is put through a mask parameter.

·        This is fed into a lerp where using a scalar you can flip the black and white values.

·        These masks are the alpha to a lerp where with two scalars you can adjust the white and black values independently.

·        At the end the original materials roughness is added in.

I can then add this function whenever I need it in other materials.

I mainly created this for the glass material.



There is certainly room for improvement with this function, like figuring out how to use it to effect colour as well. It did its job though in adding variation to tiling textures, and having it done through a triplanar projection meant it wouldn't be affected by the original props uv unwrap, as well as meaning two of the same prop would have differences in the variation.