UE5 environment Portfolio piece

Invisibeetle

A personal project I made for my portfolio, I'd love some constructive feedback on it, would it be a decent portfolio piece for a junior position? any tips for showing off the foliage in the portfolio?

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/PXBDno

https://youtu.be/53psAjV_Xgk

Eric Chadwick

This is looking great so far, keep going!

I think the video is not helping much, since Youtube won't load the 1080p until halfway through the animation. So everything looks blurry from the start. It would be better to have high-resolution screenshots instead, for example 1920x1080.

The mesh for the green energy effect has too many vertical segments, the yellow strips are wasteful geometry, because they don't add to the silhouette of the model.


It would also be a good idea to improve the shading on your tree foliage. The shading on the leaves is looking a bit hard-edged.

Some ideas to help fix this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LXFyFb9VsqEJ:wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

There are also some dark edges under your grass, which isn't helping the lighting there.

I would suggest reading up on grass shading techniques. They probably shouldn't cast shadows, and they should probably use upwards-facing vertex normals so they will get shaded the same as the ground. Some explanation of how to solve this here: https://80.lv/articles/creating-next-gen-grass-in-ue4/

Invisibeetle

super helpful stuff in those, thanks. So I've done a lot of what those pages have mentioned, I've fixed the hard shading on the leaves, and I didn't know about the grass normals thing, here's what it looks like after changing those.