Stylized Chaparral
greentooth
For the last few months my quarantine project has been to make a stylized environment kit with an emphasis on organics. I wanted to take some of the plant construction techniques I learned on WoW and apply them to something different. The kit is inspired by Vasquez Rocks natural area north of LA, which I visited two years ago with some friends. I hadn’t done anything in Unreal in a few years so this was...an experience. I went with all dynamic lighting and while it was a mess to figure out, I’m really impressed with how far indirect lighting via light propagation volumes has come.
More words to come later, maybe. For now, pictures:
EDIT: now with highlight reel
I didn't do a ton of sculpting, rocks were the exception.
For the big cliff rock I mostly focused sculpting detail on the edges. More detail was added later with tiling normal and color maps.
Some base maps, all hand-painted except for the rock and sand which used some bakes. I'd like to learn substance designer if only to generate placement of leaves on branches, but I couldn't solve that particular problem so these were all done the hard way.
Replies
@snorrow They're manzanita trees. They're real and they truly are that crazy.
I personally struggle with construction of plants and especially trees, getting the right about of geometry and level of detail. I'd love to know more about these 'Techniques' you mention if you can share any wisdom! ^^
What is the poly count of trees ?
Thanks for the kind words everyone. I put it up on artstation
Mega, economy-sized thank you to @Lucas Annunziata for giving me notes. He’s been helping me since June when the project was one shot and looked like this:
He encouraged me to put together an Overwatch-style trailer so here you go. I don’t love the Unreal sequencer but this was way easier than trying to get the camera to smoothly follow a spline.
@Jakob Gavelli Okay here’s one for you: you can have completely seamless tree trunks if you’re comfortable working with overlapping UVs. Only the trunk is seamlessly tiled in 0-1 space and the branches are unwrapped with cylinder projections and have their UVs welded to the trunk at the base. The texture is mirrored on the branches but it’s less noticeable than a seam.
Another thing are groups of three planes arranged like an arrow’s fletching. (Is there a name for these? In my head I call them trifolds.) Looks better than two planes crossed at 90 degrees, fills the screen from most angles and is still very low poly. I use these everywhere.
more trifolds!
trifolds + planes
Mirroring the UVs is really clever, also helps with getting a more even texel-density when moving from a broad trunk to a thin branch I bet? Welding the branches to the trunk and welding the UVs there is nice! I usually get lazy and just stick the branches in there, but that leaves me with some bad UV seams and shading-errors, so I'll try this approach in the future for sure!
You sell this in the Epic Marketplace, and I purchase it only to see it from time to time.
Let's be real though, we're all too lazy to click things.