Interesting approach with the hair technique. I'm not as familiar with Cinema, but I might have to give it a go in Lightwave or Blender. I love the artwork, and style. Very cool!
Nevermind, it was my post processing chain :) Now I need to tweak some meshes that are throwing errors when lightmapped and I'll post progress early tomorrow :)
The lightbar-type thing at the bottom has got to go. Very glitchy for me and a major pain in the butt. Well-arranged static thumbnails are still the gold standard...
RTX will simplify the work of lighting artists somewhat, and let them focus on the actually interesting part, instead of adjusting lightmap resolutions, trying to fix shadow acnes, and baking for hours.
Alright here are the results of having a 2048x2048 map with 16px padding. Normal mapped cube in maya: Normal map Cube in UDK Cube in UDK with lightmaps (on same UVs *0*)
The thing about Speedtree for UE4 is that you get a lot of things for free: wind anim/textures/Materials/lightmaps/LODs. There is usually some tweaking alright but it's a huge timesaver and headstart.
I intentionally wiped out the lightmaps to make the example shot look even shittier. :p And I just realized I should have posted this in the UDK subsection. Oops!