[Finished] Grass Landscape Environment (UE4)
polycounter lvl 2
Hey everyone!
A bit of time ago I saw videos from the environment in Ghost of Tsushima. I really got fascinated by the windy and atmospheric environment, so started to work on my own environment project.
Since I don't want to put much time into creating assets and foliage, I decided to create the scene mostly with quixel megascans or other free assets.
The gate (a Japanese torii), which I planned to put on top of the hill is a very specific asset, for which reason I modeled and textured it on my own.
At the moment I am still unsure about the lighting of my scene, so it is very likely that I will change it as I progress.
I'll try to share further progress and would be glad to hear any feedback on my project. Thanks a lot!
Replies
I am glad to hear that! Yeah, I know what you mean with that, even I would say it's more like a fantastical touch than really stylized. I think this is caused by a mix out of the colorful nature, the constant appearance of particles, and the lighting. All this stuff is more intense than in a realistic environment and appears everywhere in the game, which leads to a kind of magical feeling of the scenery.
Actually, I never thought about this that specifically. It gives me a good awareness of what I need to focus on.
I wish you good luck with your project.
Contrast and some level adjustments to make more readable:
High contrast elements all over the image. Dark trees here and there popping against terrain and sky that are too similar in tone.
IIRC this video covers how you can use values to give sense of depth in your scenes:
The Fundamentals of Landscapes - Art Camp 3 Preview with Noah Bradley - YouTube
Landscape material is looking last-gen. Near the camera we should see depth from the stones and grass material could be separated from dirt
by height blending. Can use 3d grass as well or at least planes.
Embers from the sconces are too big I think.
Personally i would take out the fire in the sconces and let sunset colors be the star of the show. Lower the atmosphere so we get a richer display and give bolder clouds that also have more depth. Scoot camera way back and see more rolling hills going into distance.
If only a few clusters of trees here and there, more empty space in between will give that nice sense you get when you see a vast open area.
Too many colors I think and blending together perhaps with bloom too much. Makes it feel washed out despite plenty on the palette. Maybe experiment with having the foreground mostly silhouetted, strong sunset colors, let height fog create rolling hills and the two tree clusters define the empty vastness.
This a grab from terrain i am testing some stuff on. Just shows how you can use exponential height fog to help tie together scene and give depth.
Also note in most your references the placement of key subjects on the screen. Usually pretty far off to one side, lots of "empty" space - mimicking the old Asian paintings. I'd move your pagoda thing further from center and consider raising it bit more above trees. Don't scale it just change angle of view and maybe put on more prominent hill.
Thanks for your input.
Most things you mentioned I am already working on or I plan to adjust. But it is good to know, I am on the right way.
I will rework the ground and of course, there is the foliage missing on that post.
My plan to get rid of the high contrasts and missing depth would be to get a local exponential fog around the path to set more focus on the hill. But I will take a look at the video and see what I could do.
As I said, I am not sure about the lighting at the moment and I will experiment with the time of day and intensity of the lanterns later when I got all foliage placed and the fog ready to adjust. My first idea would be to go more towards nighttime to have the path pop out because of the light contrast. But I will try the sunset as well to see which result will fit better.
Let's start with my decision to expand the way to the hill on the top right to keep the scene a bit more interesting, even it does not make that much sense to lead a path along that curve.
The grass foliage is made out of 2 grass sets from the quixel library, which I put in the grass type note from my landscape. Since quixels default foliage material has just a very basic wind implemented, I decided to make my own global wind. With that, I can give the foliage a specific direction to bend and sway, so it is really looking like all foliage is affected by the same wind.
To break up the patterns of the ground material on the path, I used decals with grass leaves and mud to get more variation and make the tile pattern less visible.
My next step will be to get the local fog working. Then I will put in foliage along the path and stones and other stuff to scatter on the ground. Next to that, I want to implement a ground blend note so the assets don't pop out that much anymore and look more natural in the environment.
I appreciate every feedback or comment and thank you very much for checking out my project.
A couple things that jump out to me still:
can the stone wall and foliage closest to camera make use of a lower LOD? I think current gen games you would expect the mossy top and stones on the side of the wall prop to have geometry which defines the silhouette. For desktop and console games performance can be tailored by how quickly you call higher LOD's, so that allows for some pretty high resolution meshes near the camera.
Also, the ground close to camera, can you make use of displacement/tesselation materials to have a more 3 dimensional ground? Or maybe just some scatter meshes to break things up and add depth?
A technique I've used is to have a disc shaped mesh that isn't perfectly flat. You put a texture with an alpha on it, like little pebbles or fallen leaves. You can scatter these around and it makes the ground look more real. Especially at transition zones or where models penetrate, this can be useful for covering up those perfect CG lines and making it feel more believable.
I believe megascans has some free scenes that you can find on the unreal marketplace. They'll probably have good examples of these techniques. I think "forest path" might be a good one to look at.
Nice progress!
I am glad to hear that.
When I imported them the first time, I thought the same about the wall. Unfortunately, the moss is not defined in the mesh. But maybe I am able to find a workaround for that.
I really like the idea of breaking up the ground with meshes and will implement that for sure.
It is funny you mention exactly this quixel scene. Because that is the scene, which I used as a reference for my workflow.
First of all, I got my groundblend material working and put it on the assets in my scene.
With that, I merged some embankment meshes and scattered rocks with my landscape to break up the even ground.
Next to this, I painted some tiny debris, sticks, and stones as foliage to give the ground some actual depth and height variation.
Because I want to save some performance I decided to merge some big scattered rocks and placed them by hand around the walls instead of using the foliage tool.
At last, I placed local volumetric fog around the path, which I will adjust more later.
The next thing on my list will be to add plants around the path and stones and continue to work on the fog because it's a bit boring and even right now.
Thank you for stopping by.
I painted the missing foliage around the way and walls. I am still not completely happy with it, but before I keep changing it repeatedly, I first wanted to get some feedback. I am not sure what exactly the problem is if it's too much or still missing something. Maybe too much flowerlike foliage or the color is too much off from the meadow? I really can't tell right now. Hopefully, a pair of fresh eyes can help me with that.
Since the background was feeling very empty I decided to put some free landscape meshes around my scene, which I found in the unreal store.
To make my scene a bit more interesting I created a quite easy particle system with some flying grass leaves. Right now it's just there in the scene, probably I'll attach it to the camera later
When you compare the screenshots from this post to the last one, you will notice I started to play around with lighting and the postprocess volume. Because the stone lamps around the path are actually blocking a lot of the light I placed pointlights above them, to get more even lighting. I struggle a bit with lighting, so it will take me some research and youtube videos till I really get the result I am aiming for.
While working on the project, another new problem appeared. When I place my camera around the "final shot position" and go in the fullscreen mode I only get around 20fps. I already spend some time trying to optimize my scene, tweaking LODs, the radius of lights, and some other stuff. The combination of volumetric lights and so much grass foliage uses a lot of performance. I've got some ideas how I could save some performance, but I will push that to the point, where I placed all foliage and particles.
As I said, I am not totally happy with the foliage and not done with the lighting, so I will keep working on that. Next to this I still have to look at my fog. The material right now is as simple as possible with just color and extinction input for the volumetric effect. I would like to make it a bit more interesting and not just a foggy wall.
Thank you very much for taking a look at my project. I appreciate every feedback and comment, it helped me already a lot.
Nothing to do but little tweaks now until it really pops I think.
What if you had a little more light on the horizon so those tree silhouettes popped a little more?
And this may be too hard to do at this point, but to me that path feels so wide a car could drive down it. If it was more narrow I think it would make things feel different - more old worldly. If you ever played the original Shenmue that is one of the things I immediately noticed even though I was a kid when I played it. Streets, alleys, staircases - everything was realistically sized and it was very jarring because until then all the games I had played usually had sort of oversized environments - for gameplay purposes I imagine but it does change the way the scene feels for sure.
Anyway just some ideas, great work!
how far you are drawing grass will be a big thing. It is also good to cut down on overdraw by matching the geometry to the grass texture. You can visualize quad overdraw with one of those toolbar menus. Maybe under optimization visualization menu I think.
For instance, in my game a single glass cluster has like 500-100 vertices. That's a lot, but it eliminates overdraw entirely, so it is actually more performant than using clusters that have like 12 vertices but tons of overdraw.
Number of textures and how big they are also makes a difference. In the case of your scene, you can probably use pretty small textures, like 512 or lower, and not see a difference. Maybe for right next to the camera you have some individually placed items with higher resolution if you really want to show of some fine detail. If you are using grass that someone else made, chances are the shader is more complex than necessary and it has a bunch of textures you don't need. Maybe other people would disagree but for grass I am only using a color and opacity texture, nothing else. SSS can use the albedo texture, just use a few nodes to adjust it in the shader to make brighter or w/e you need.
Cutting down textures seems to me to make the largest difference.
Just fyi but your objects placed with the foliage brush will save performance compared to individually placed actors. Look up the documentation about instanced static meshes to understand why. In the case of a small scene and just a handful of actors it won't matter, but if things get larger it will.
You can enter the console command "stat unit" to see and "stat unit graph" to see a breakdown of where exactly the biggest delays are. Of course in a scene with only grass we can pretty much guess, but if you are interested in fine tuning perofrmance good to know some of these tools. Unreal has several talks on youtube where they go over how ot use them in more detail.
another fantastic reference for outdoor scenes with good performance is the Rural Australia pack you can find on marketplace. It was made by I think the art director of battlefield games. It's beautiful work but also has a lot of optimization tricks and he has commented it well so good learning resource.
Here I am again, with another short update.
I tweaked the lighting a bit more and adjusted the fog and its position. Now it's supporting the scene a bit more, blurring out the uninteresting areas and showing the silhouette of the mountains.
Next to that, I added a second grass type layer which I masked with the existing one. By that, I get a more natural-looking meadow with some more variation.
Since the sky was very empty and takes a big part of my scene because it is not hidden behind trees or buildings, I decided to fill the empty space with a moon. I was able to find scanned textures from NASA, which they put up for creative work, and just put it on a sphere with emissive color. Because the moon-sphere is exactly lined up with the directional light I get nice light shafts around it, which look like a nice bloom around it.
Overall I started to optimize my scene by adjusting LOD settings, draw distances, and screwing down the quality of materials.
After experimenting with camera-angles for a final shot I felt like the left side in front of the stairs of the path was a bit empty. After I got some feedback that addressed exactly this, I decided to fill this empty area with a small shrine or gravestone thing. I already had some assets in my mind, which I stumbled over while searching for assets for my scene. So it was quite easy to put this together with some candles, flowers, and candlelight particles. Now I need to position it, so it's actually good visible in my final shot.
Thank you for checking out my project and I'd love to hear your opinion and ideas.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWRGmrJ1Oeo
Feel free to check out the whole project with all shots and videos on my artstation page
I have a full list of things I will do differently in further projects, which I only could figure out by going through the process of doing things the way I've done it. I decided to share some of the general stuff, so you maybe can share your opinion about it:
- Spend more time with preplanning in sketches and blockouts
- Do a more extensive blockout then I've done it
- Get a more specific idea of the final shot and the composition of it (dark areas, light areas, focus for the viewer, objects shouldn't overlap)
- Set up the final lighting after your blockout (I needed to rework stuff a lot because I did the lighting in the end)
- Do foliage in the background first, so you can get a feeling for it for the foreground
I really enjoyed working on this project and I could learn and relearn a ton. I want to thank everyone who shared his suggestions and feedback with me, it helped me a lot. I appreciate every comment, I'd love to hear your opinion.
Thank you very much for taking a look at my project, I hope you enjoy it.