Sketchbook: erebus9

erebus9

I feel like It's time to start being more punctual and keep track of the progress i make, thus stimulate my activity and take on some responsibility. And also to have some kind of a shelter where i can store my poops for future admiration and just seizing the path i already made.

I would like to end this welcoming speech to my dreams and efforts with an aphorism that i like a lot, sadly i don't remember it exactly, so i will say it in my words:

Imagine your growth path not as a ladder or hill that you need to climb making enormous efforts in a short time, but put your path in a horizontal plane, imagine it being a desert or put it in the setting you like, all you need is to walk, to make a long-time improvement all you need is to make steps, one by one, baby steps as they say, all you need is a continuous effort!

erebus9

New old project: Gloomy Vegetation Scene

Intro

I'll be honest with you, i had very little experience in the past with unreal engine, nor any other game engine, and i've never worked with foliage, though i think that i have an understanding of how it's done, just never had enough courage to tackle this complicated theme.

This spring i've decided to make a nature scene, full of vegetation and such stuff, i spent some time on it, but then i dropped it and switched to other things. Now it's the time to reborn this piece and put all my effort into this frightening but promising task.

Scraps of previous work

It all started with pinterest searching for ideas, when i stumbled upon an image that i liked, then i found another one that looked similar to the first one and i thought that it would accompany it well. After that I did kind of a simple kitbash, and that was my main ref.



The overall result of what was done can be seen in an image below.

Outro

So, from here we start. I need some time to gather what i have and to plan my future work, then i'll come back with an update, cya!

iam717

Those are some inspiring looking references, would love to see this made with love, we will see, all the best with the engine i hear blue prints are the way to go.

erebus9

iam717 said:

Those are some inspiring looking references, would love to see this made with love, we will see, all the best with the engine i hear blue prints are the way to go.

Hi, thank you for stopping by and for kind words. Sorry for the late reply, I was a little daunted with the task.
Lately I've spent not as much time as i would like to on this project. Currently I'm struggling with a tree. I did identify it, and I think I've done it correctly, to my understanding the main tree on the ref is Prunus Salicina (Chinese Plum).

So I've jumped into SpeedTree with no previous experience with the software. And though the software itself isn't seem hard, actually creating a realistic tree takes time. And since I aim to build this environment being game-ready, I struggle even more.

But what brings me back some peace regarding this tough task is looking at references and finding more of them, because this way I can understand the structure more and without it I feel like I'm lost on this track of creating a good-looking tree. 

I will attach some of my current attempts including some drawings and atlas placeholder, though they look bad as hell, I think it will be nice to document them there. 

Try 1

Try 2

5 different Atlas variations and a tree breakdown

I am currently thinking of cutting the scope to just this tree and make it as good as I can, because with the vegetation I don't want to move too fast and thus skip essential and important fundament. My drawing skills are very poor, I actually never draw in my life except for the child paintings like all the kids do, but having a tablet, doing constant Ctrl+Z, utilizing smooth stroke and moving slow really helps.

Currently I'm gathering more references to understand how to incorporate fronds (large branches being replaced with the texture-cluster map) into my tree structure.

Even though you didn't ask for that, I decided that I will make a post. Thanks to you! Otherwise I probably would delay it even more until there would be more to show.

erebus9

Cheers to all my little droogies!

Recently I continued working on the scene, well, currently it's just a tree the piece I got stuck on. But i believe that once I learn how to make it and make it well, the process will speed up significantly, because as I said vegetation is something that I am not familiar with at all, so it's quite a challenge, a daunting one I must say! And man, how scary it is to start! Especially when you don't know where to place your foot!

A new beginning

I was really stuck on and was avoiding getting back to it because of how the task looked complicated and I had no real ground to stay on, and so it was, just looking at tutorials where people mostly just click on here and there and trying to mimic their behavior when trying to make a tree led me to a wrong trail.

So I decided to tackle this question with more analytical approach, and here I don't talk about getting references, because regarding this aspect I've done a pretty vast research and collected a good library to work with. 

So I went to SpeedTree's documentation and started to read through it, in order to get a better understanding of when and why you should do a particular action and it really helped me at the end, because many things you may think you understand, are actualy a pretty surface-like understanding of the question and getting a good through read and time and effort to really process this information even if it seems obvious, it helps to lay all the things on their shelves and suddenly the process of creating a tree doesn't seem so daunting anymore. I also took another look of some of their educational videos, there are plenty of information, you just have to slow it down and really process it, take it slowly, bit by bit, that's what helped me. 

Intermediate result! Iteration #3

And here is the tree iteration that I've got, I've spent about 4 to 6 hours to create it from scratch and for me this is a pretty small amount of time for that quality of work, especially if you compare it with my previous iterations that you can find in this thread, still there are plenty to do but I already see it shaping up nicely. For now it's just 4.7k of tris and I aim to make it being lower than 10k which is I believe a good amount for the game-ready tree.