Forest Environment UE4
polycounter lvl 4
Hello Polycount. Im looking for some c&c for my current project. Feel free to tear it apart if you want, Im always wanting to improve. The last image is my reference sheet for the trees, based on the black spruce. The environment is based off of the taiga and forests in the northern latitudes. This project is still a work in progress.
Replies
Here is few suggestions:
1.Try to fix shoreline, better blend between water and sand would be nice,you can use depth fade effect for this
2.Also work a bit more on grass, it looks too noisy
3.Add more variation, some small fir trees around big ones could create more interesting picture
Keep it up!:)
This is looking very nice as a firm start, only thing left to do is some polish work as it seems to me.
Can't really add anything more than Mellon3D did, except for some details that could make the tiling of the grass less obvious.
This is done by adding a object position ws node to the base color of the grass.
( example below )
This will help in breaking the tiling of the grass if you can tweak it right.
Hope this was of any help, and love to see this progress further!
The shading on some of the foliage could be improved I think. Did you tweak the vertex normals at all? http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/VertexNormal#Foliage_Shading
Also adding some different vegetation would help as well.
There can also be a very slight use of emissive to lighten upp the trees and fake ambient sky translucency but you have to very VERY careful with this though as just a little to much will make everything look really off, it can be combined with a simple vertex color paint at the bottom of the planes where it is most likely there will be too much black.
And thanks Luxap, I'm going to give that a shot instead of the SpeedTree color variation node.
No problem, but this is a setup I found on the internet, so you could optimize it, or use a different texture and such.
You can message me if you have any troubles with the setup tough, and I'll help you out.
(not a UE4 pro but I'll do my best =D)
[ame]
@Holly Mellor: Im in the process of making more flowers and ill add some variation to what I already have.
@Mellon3D: I agree the grass is too noisy. Ive got a few ideas on how to soften the look, starting by bluring the alpha. Ill add more tree variation soon as well.
@DKeymer3d: Worldmachine first, then sculpted some if it in Zbrush to get the precise forms I wanted. Landscape editor in UE4 helped with smoothing out some edges and final on the fly edits. My landscape shader is like the UE4 Landscape Mountains demo on the marketplace.
@Luxap: Thanks for the example, Ill mess around with that.
@Joost: Here are the grass normals
@Fozwroth: Ill try that out soon, I didnt edit the foliage normals at the start of the project, but I also wasnt aware of the emissive and subsurface methods.
Right now all foliage is using one master shader with emissive, subsurface and edited normals. One more thing, your work on BF4 is amazing and its one of the reasons I am this far into my own work.
@Beefaroni: here is my wind network.
Here is a shot of some rocks from the scene. I made this post late last night and forgot to add it.
So does it matter if the foliage normals are edited or not? Is this one of those issues where its up to me to decide which looks better or is there a clear cut way to do things?
-Changed the vertex normals on the trees
-Played with lighting and post process
-Tweaked lightshafts
-Added various foliage
That does it on the assets unless im missing something. If you think I am please tell me.
Not much left to do except set dressing, texture, and shader work. I dont know whether to use a LUT texture or not since I am happy with the lighting and post process as is.
Oh and the water shader is starting to get under my skin. Is translucency in UE4 still broken in terms of reflections or is there another hacky way of making it work? I have tried reflection captures of all types but none work for me.
C&C always welcome and very much appreciated.
PICS!!
I feel thats its looking good so far but is this almost portfolio ready?? Thats a question im really struggling with.
I upped the saturation of the main directional light and added a LUT texture to help push the scene towards the early evening feel I wanted.
Im going to shift the color of the pink foxglove plants towards purple to help them blend better with the blue flowers.