[UDK] mossy forest

ZacD

Spent about 2 days on this so far, its my goal to finish it by Friday. Its a screen grab straight for UDK, no tweaks in photoshop. I've never really lit any outdoor scenes from scratch. I'm just trying to get it portfolio ready. I'm missing a few model details like the knots, branches, limbs, and fallen trees. I plan on redoing the tent and adding very small grass foliage. Also the trees were really quickly placed by the foliage tool, I plan on hand placing the ones in front for the final screen shot. Also need to add some terrain variation.

I had to do some weird tricks with the lighting to get it to work exactly how I wanted, I basically just baked the sky or environment lighting to look over cast, I have one light that doesn't affect anything doing the god rays, and other, unbaked light that doesn't cast shadows adding the directional lighting coming from the right on the trees. There is a slight vignette effect I borrowed from the stock UDK contents. Most of the major tweaks to get it to exactly match the photo was done with post effects.

chrisradsby

Great start! Now make some alpha-planes with different sized branches and add some more geometry to the trees. Completely straight trees are rare, make sure to have a couple of different ones. 3-4 maybe? Then rotate them around to make em feel more unique. Don't forget to make the terrain more natural, with natural small hills and bumps.

Good work so far!

gsokol

The second image is a ref, right?

The flat, uninteresting ground is the biggest thing going against you. The scene is pretty simple, with only a few elements, so you need to make sure they look really good.

Definitely add some elevation change, your ground looks really flat. It looks like you blended 2 textures together on your terrain, but its still kinda plain...maybe add a few more textures to blend with.

Also, you could break up the ground by adding downed twigs/branches, like the ref.

Your trees just kinda end in the background. Makes it obvious that beyond the trees nothing is there. Maybe add some more in the background to close out the white areas...so make it look like you are actually in a thick wooded area.

Good luck!

ZacD

Thanks for the advice, added a more varied terrain (using a static mesh), but that's causing some issues with painting grass foliage, it used the collision mesh to plant the objects, and I used the auto collision just to do it quickly, but it doesn't seem it has enough of the detail and places a lot of patches under the terrain, I was wonder if there was an easy way just to use the mesh for collision or to generate a more accurate one. I did break the terrain into 2 pieces, a near one with more geo, and a distance one, but that isn't helping enough

Justin Meisse

why not use the terrain system for the terrain - you get automatic collision and you can make adjustments to it right there in the scene.

ZacD

New things scare me Actually I'll give it a try, I just figured it'd be quicker sticking to the tools I know, but I've heard a lot of good things about udk's new terrain.