Ancient Forest (Vincent Lebocey concept sketch)

MattJQuint

Happy Holidays everyone,

Just "finished" my second ever unreal engine environment based on a really cool sketch from Vincent Lebocey. It took quite a long time as I've never attempted an exterior scene with foliage in UE4 before. I got my start in 3D with SubD modeling and rendering with Vray so Realtime rendering is still relatively new to me. 

I wanted to put this up here so someone other than me might take a look at it, since I've been staring at it for about a month now. I'm mostly curious about things I could improve, camera, composition, lighting, etc.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

teodar23

I would have used that pasage as the main focus. Light should be used to focus it instead of the pathway. Also, i would have made it more interesting - right now its the same model repeated 6 times.
The pathway needs work as it is just a bunch of cubes placed in a pseudo random fashion. You can find a bunch of scanned assets that might go there in quixel bridge.
The grass is too uniformly green - there's a per instance color variation node in the material editor.
The lighting seems fake and thats's probably because it is. Nothing wrong with placing some fill lights here and there but make sure they are subtle. Turn down their intensity and disable shadows or else you get that car headlight effect where you think there's a car somewhere in the scene. Fill or fake lights should be there as a support for the real lights in the scene. If most of your lighting is done by the fill lights then you need to rethink your lighting setup.
Also i would try to add a light and some fog in that pasage, just to see how it looks.
Keep at it.

MattJQuint

@teodar23 Hey thanks for the feedback! Yeah now that you mention it, the pathway really looks pretty bland, with just the cubes scattered. The concept was very sketch heavy so I couldn't really tell what was there, but that's where I'm supposed to come in and make it interesting haha. I can make some more objects like worn stone stairs or something similar to place there or piles of rubble. The passage is indeed one model yes, I could definitely experiment with breaking it into pieces, make some look damaged, etc. I was thinking of modularity in mind with the scene, trying to get the most out of one model, but I agree it does start to show since they are all near each other.

Definitely agree with the grass, variation in color would look much better.

The lighting is definitely the part I'm most new to. I only have two lights in the scene, a directional light and a spot light with an IES profile on it with some Exponential Height Fog lightly throughout the scene. I have the shadows on the spotlight turned up because the contact shadows on the ground were non-existent, and it looked like the pathway bricks were just floating. I'll definitely keep experimenting. Thanks again!