I'd just love to see your high polys if anything! I'm trying to make foliage from scratch at the minute and it'd be a huge help. And how did you make the ground plane? Is it sculpted?
This is absolutely gorgeous. Keep up the great work. I just started getting into UE4 and I'm really liking it so far. Anyway you may be able to put a pack together of yoru textures and assets and possible sell? I will be definitely interested.
This is absolutely gorgeous, keep up the great work. I just got into UE4 and so far I'm loving it. Curious if you would be willing to get a pack together of your textures and assets and sell them on the market place. I will definitely be willing to buy. Let me know.
Hey guys. Been a week or two but I am pleased to share the most recent version of the forest. It's not so much a new time of day or weather but I wanted to really push for something difficult. As of right now I'll be taking a few days break then getting to a breakdown that shows as much as I can.
With this one a video is probably a bit better to watch than looking at pictures. Also I had a massive night mare dealing with compression so for those curious here is a much nicer version of the video at around ~70mb (I highly recommend this link over youtube).
Digging the summer and fire ones. Really nice stuff. The fall version is getting a little one-note in its hue for me. Orange leaves with orange lighting is leaving it a little flat. It feels like it needs a little ambient in a cool hue, or a possible desaturation of your primary light/sun source.
Digging the summer and fire ones. Really nice stuff. The fall version is getting a little one-note in its hue for me. Orange leaves with orange lighting is leaving it a little flat. It feels like it needs a little ambient in a cool hue, or a possible desaturation of your primary light/sun source.
Not the same lighting conditions obviously, but see how the ambient cool tones bleed into the neutrals, giving the eye a rest.
Hey man thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree about the monochromaticness of the fall afternoon time of day. I took great effort to bring in reds and yellows and didn't give enough attention to the ambient blues and cooler colors. I think the next time I take a stab at fall won't be so late in the afternoon or so directly in sunlight. Image saved for reference!
People asked so delivering at least part 1 of a breakdown for the forest day. Went into quite a bit of detail so I wont add much in text but I will add some. I will definitely be doing a 2nd breakdown of the forest fire but that will take quite a bit more work and I don't quite have time at the moment. Will be at least a few weeks for that one.
Lets start with some textures. For the most part, terrain and tree/rock textures were all built with displacement via tessellation and vert blending in mind. While not every texture had a proper roughness map, most were approximated using in game values. For reasons I'll go into later on other versions of this forest, I was insanely limited on texture space so every material had to fit a large amount of masks in only 3 textures. I also discovered that height for blending did NOT make good height for displacement and had to separate those 2 out. Every material except for foliage had an option to use world space blended textures instead of traditional UVs and could be tweaked, tinted, and adjusted in quite a few different ways.
Below are the main textures I used for terrain and rocks. For rocks specifically I went with low detail of large shapes because I knew I would use geometrey for form definition and vert painting between material types to create variation. I tried to stick with photosource for most of these but there was quite a bit of hand work done in places to keep the visual fidelity high.
Finally my end game takeaways from my terrain and rock texturework:
-I loved some of the detail that came from the photosourcing visually
-When it worked correctly the tessellation was a huge boon to the final visual quality of everything
-Tessellation just doesn't matter that much at a distance. Cant rely on it for ground breakup the same way you would up close without destroying performance
-Base geometrey detail matters for tessellation. I had to tessellate my ground plane VERY specifically to get the detail I wanted in the places I wanted
-Vert blending was as always an instant win for ease of use and variety
-For tessellation small shapes pretty much don't matter, but height variation for stuff like dirt is useful to add interest to the ground plane
-Photosource normals won't ever be as good as zbrushed or hand made textures without lots of custom work but it can be done
Up next shrubs! Not much to say here. A mix of photo source and using custom geo either rendered in Maya or SpeedTree to get good base textures. The grass was a ton of work to get to where it was but I would have loved it to be more photo realistic.
And now trees and tree bark. The bark had the option of vert painting 1 extra material and I took advantage of that specifically with the birch trees. The trees took a ton of R&D and I'm still super pleased with the beech trees. That being said the images explain themselves so I'll keep this part short.
Finally the foliage rendering. Below is a comparison as I added features and tweaked lighting on a single tree. Not everything I did was required for final image quality and while I used realtime LPV's in unreal, I got similar results with other techniques if performance is a potential problem.
Anyway, that about wraps it up for part 1. I'll be around for questions and a link the imgur gallery is here: http://imgur.com/a/fHBNK
I learned a metric ton doing this and hopefully someone else will too. On to the next project!
1. Foliage lightning model is some option in UE 4?
2. Ambient light can be added via Actor or soemthing in engine?
3. Light propagation volumes. Can you post a screen from engine how it looks and some settings of it if any?
4. LUT. What is that?
Sorry for those noobish questions, but if you are around and have some time, it could help me understand the engine.
1. Foliage lightning model is some option in UE 4?
2. Ambient light can be added via Actor or soemthing in engine?
3. Light propagation volumes. Can you post a screen from engine how it looks and some settings of it if any?
4. LUT. What is that?
Sorry for those noobish questions, but if you are around and have some time, it could help me understand the engine.
Man I just wrote out a huge response then accidentally closed the page. Take 2!
1. The foliage lighting model was added to UE4.7 and from what I can tell is a slight adjustment on the sub surface lighting option that existed before. So far the biggest difference I have noticed is that it helps with how ambient occlusion is generated and helps to remove some awkward dark spots that can sometimes pop up under leaf cards.
Lol, don't worry about 20k tree tri count. You're either doing a mobile game, which lower it, or a "triple A" game, in which case times that by about 5.
If you could share you leaf shader that would be amazing. I have been struggling with getting my leaves to look good with the new foliage shader model in ue4. Getting good roughness and SS maps proves difficult.
Also regarding what locater16 said: Is it true going over 20K per tree is acceptable for next gen? 5 times more? That seams very high.
I guess we can only speculate until we get our hands on Witcher 3 or some other foliage heavy next gen game.
Side note: Your textures look great considering they were generated mostly from Photos. Did you use nD0 or BitmaptoMaterial?
If you could share you leaf shader that would be amazing. I have been struggling with getting my leaves to look good with the new foliage shader model in ue4. Getting good roughness and SS maps proves difficult.
Also regarding what locater16 said: Is it true going over 20K per tree is acceptable for next gen? 5 times more? That seams very high.
Absolutely, Far Cry 4 has already shipped with 100k+ polys per tree. It will depend of course on what engine you're finally running on, but it's quite possible.
This is great! What hardware where you running this on? And how high of an FPS can you sustain? It looks amazing and thanks for the breakdown never the less ^^.
Are there any other settings that need to be set for the Light Propagation Volume to work correctly? Using the default settings produces very strong light bleeding and chunky artifacts for me (default settings, size 20000). If you can find the time, it would be much appreciated if you could go into a little more detail of your lighting setup in UE4.
In any case, thanks a lot for sharing your work, it's really inspiring to see what can be done in UE4!
Wow, that looks AMAZING!!!!!! Do you got a good Tutorial to understand the complete lightning system of the UE 4?
I don't have any specific tutorial in mind. The breakdown image I posted regarding my lighting was how I got where I did for foliage but the summary of the different light types and how they interact on epic's UE4 documentation is super informative. I would definitely start there if you are just getting into the engine.
I have one bit of feedback regarding your daylight scene. I think you've set the frequency of leaves falling from the trees too high, I'd recommend lowering the spawn rate by 75-95%.
Replies
The scene looks amazing though!
Cheers
Cheers
With this one a video is probably a bit better to watch than looking at pictures. Also I had a massive night mare dealing with compression so for those curious here is a much nicer version of the video at around ~70mb (I highly recommend this link over youtube).
Direct link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wdyc08wggbzgjzf/ForestFire_Optimized2.mp4?dl=0
[ame="
Alex
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Fall-foliage-forest-foot-trail-bridge_-_West_Virginia_-_ForestWander.jpg
Not the same lighting conditions obviously, but see how the ambient cool tones bleed into the neutrals, giving the eye a rest.
Hey man thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree about the monochromaticness of the fall afternoon time of day. I took great effort to bring in reds and yellows and didn't give enough attention to the ambient blues and cooler colors. I think the next time I take a stab at fall won't be so late in the afternoon or so directly in sunlight. Image saved for reference!
Alex
Lets start with some textures. For the most part, terrain and tree/rock textures were all built with displacement via tessellation and vert blending in mind. While not every texture had a proper roughness map, most were approximated using in game values. For reasons I'll go into later on other versions of this forest, I was insanely limited on texture space so every material had to fit a large amount of masks in only 3 textures. I also discovered that height for blending did NOT make good height for displacement and had to separate those 2 out. Every material except for foliage had an option to use world space blended textures instead of traditional UVs and could be tweaked, tinted, and adjusted in quite a few different ways.
Below are the main textures I used for terrain and rocks. For rocks specifically I went with low detail of large shapes because I knew I would use geometrey for form definition and vert painting between material types to create variation. I tried to stick with photosource for most of these but there was quite a bit of hand work done in places to keep the visual fidelity high.
Finally my end game takeaways from my terrain and rock texturework:
-I loved some of the detail that came from the photosourcing visually
-When it worked correctly the tessellation was a huge boon to the final visual quality of everything
-Tessellation just doesn't matter that much at a distance. Cant rely on it for ground breakup the same way you would up close without destroying performance
-Base geometrey detail matters for tessellation. I had to tessellate my ground plane VERY specifically to get the detail I wanted in the places I wanted
-Vert blending was as always an instant win for ease of use and variety
-For tessellation small shapes pretty much don't matter, but height variation for stuff like dirt is useful to add interest to the ground plane
-Photosource normals won't ever be as good as zbrushed or hand made textures without lots of custom work but it can be done
Up next shrubs! Not much to say here. A mix of photo source and using custom geo either rendered in Maya or SpeedTree to get good base textures. The grass was a ton of work to get to where it was but I would have loved it to be more photo realistic.
And now trees and tree bark. The bark had the option of vert painting 1 extra material and I took advantage of that specifically with the birch trees. The trees took a ton of R&D and I'm still super pleased with the beech trees. That being said the images explain themselves so I'll keep this part short.
Finally the foliage rendering. Below is a comparison as I added features and tweaked lighting on a single tree. Not everything I did was required for final image quality and while I used realtime LPV's in unreal, I got similar results with other techniques if performance is a potential problem.
Anyway, that about wraps it up for part 1. I'll be around for questions and a link the imgur gallery is here: http://imgur.com/a/fHBNK
I learned a metric ton doing this and hopefully someone else will too. On to the next project!
2. Ambient light can be added via Actor or soemthing in engine?
3. Light propagation volumes. Can you post a screen from engine how it looks and some settings of it if any?
4. LUT. What is that?
Sorry for those noobish questions, but if you are around and have some time, it could help me understand the engine.
Man I just wrote out a huge response then accidentally closed the page. Take 2!
1. The foliage lighting model was added to UE4.7 and from what I can tell is a slight adjustment on the sub surface lighting option that existed before. So far the biggest difference I have noticed is that it helps with how ambient occlusion is generated and helps to remove some awkward dark spots that can sometimes pop up under leaf cards.
2. Ambient light can be added via the sky light actor. I find it pretty damn valuable when it comes to foliage rendering. More info here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/LightTypes/SkyLight/index.html
3. I pretty much used the out of box LPV settings. For my actual forest I extended the range to help grab more trees. More info here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/LightPropagationVolumes/index.html
4. LUT = Color Lookup Table. A texture that the scene reads to adjust or shift color one direction or another. These textures can be made by hand but there are some sweet collections out there. Epic's info on it is here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/PostProcessEffects/ColorGrading/index.html
I make my own but 2 awesome collections exist over on Epic's forums here:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?48641-LUT-Table-Pack
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?30500-Color-Lookup-Table-Collection
Thanks for the breakdown though!
If you could share you leaf shader that would be amazing. I have been struggling with getting my leaves to look good with the new foliage shader model in ue4. Getting good roughness and SS maps proves difficult.
Also regarding what locater16 said: Is it true going over 20K per tree is acceptable for next gen? 5 times more? That seams very high.
I guess we can only speculate until we get our hands on Witcher 3 or some other foliage heavy next gen game.
Side note: Your textures look great considering they were generated mostly from Photos. Did you use nD0 or BitmaptoMaterial?
Absolutely, Far Cry 4 has already shipped with 100k+ polys per tree. It will depend of course on what engine you're finally running on, but it's quite possible.
Are there any other settings that need to be set for the Light Propagation Volume to work correctly? Using the default settings produces very strong light bleeding and chunky artifacts for me (default settings, size 20000). If you can find the time, it would be much appreciated if you could go into a little more detail of your lighting setup in UE4.
In any case, thanks a lot for sharing your work, it's really inspiring to see what can be done in UE4!
I don't have any specific tutorial in mind. The breakdown image I posted regarding my lighting was how I got where I did for foliage but the summary of the different light types and how they interact on epic's UE4 documentation is super informative. I would definitely start there if you are just getting into the engine.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/LightTypes/index.html
I have one bit of feedback regarding your daylight scene. I think you've set the frequency of leaves falling from the trees too high, I'd recommend lowering the spawn rate by 75-95%.
Very nice work.