Huge RPG styled landscape showcase WIP

Hi there,

this is my first post on this forum. Im an environmental/modelling artist working in the movieindustry for quite some time, but was always interested in gameart.
So when the unreal 4 engine released i started experimenting alot with environmental design and asset creation. I am currently working on and off on my own unique landscape suitable for a modern AAA type RPG game with immersion in mind. The screenshots below will showcase a bit of my progress. Keep in mind that all you see is created by myself. There is no single texture or asset that was bought or reused from any existing prjoect. Everythng is handmade from scratch using applications like photoshop, maya and zbrush. In addition there are also already alot of assets like medivial buildings and objects that i will show at a later time because im still working on them.

There’s still alot to be done and im not nearly as satisfied with the results as i would like to be, but at this point i would be glad to get some feedback from you guys. :smiley:
Since im not a very technical artist but more of a visual man i used a lot of tutorials to create i.e. the landscapeshader and stuff like interactive foliage and day/nightcycles(though night still looks terrible cause of fog and no skylightinteraction with the blueprint).
I will also post some videos in the future with small walkthroughs and try to keep you updated on the proggress.

Obviously there is no gameplay since i have absolutely zero programming/blueprintskills.

Anyway before the wall of text will hit critically ill end my introduction at this point and let the screenshots i’ve prepared speak for themselves. I hope you like it.

regards Maxi

UPDATE:

http://imgur.com/a/dzi6t









Hey there, welcome to the forums! :slight_smile:

I hope you don’t mind, but I edited your post to add the photos for you, they are too good to miss! Great work, love it!

Nice work, I love your sense of scale with things. As a digital painter one of the first things I notice in game art is how often environmental artists get the size of things like grass wrong. This feels correct.

Hehe does it really happen that often? I have noticed it very rarely.

Hi

@: thank you very much that was very kind of you :D

@coalminds: thanks to you too, though im not completely satisfied with the grass esp. the scaling. In 4.12 they added random scaling to the grasstype and it would be nice if i could somehow hook this scaling to the paintlayerweight so it gets smaller towards others layers to make the transition feel more natural. Maybe if someone has some insight into that :>.

Anyway i got another set of images for you from an older landscapebuild but with some of the nonfoliage assets im working on.- Ive switched to a newer landscape, that is tiled so i can make it bigger-. They only thing, thats mostly finished is the watermill (but still no lods and no interior).
I still somehow cant upload images directly to the forum (i get an “page not found” error after the upload finished), so i’ve prepared another imgurlink.

for the people who are interested in technical data:

i get around 40-50 frames per sec on the newer landscape with scaling on epic on a gtx970. And there is still a lot that isnt optimized so i guess im on the right track.

Very nice work. I assumed that the foliage was made in speedtree, but it sounds like it wasn’t?

Nope. The trees are all handmade :). I dont like to pay for something i can do myself and esp. i dont like the way the speedtrees look when you get closer. They have this modular feeling, kinda generic (though i kinda had the idea to make my own treegenerator within houdini) . I even modelled the twigs and leaves and baked them onto planes to get good normalmaps and take away the planar feel . I made about 5-8 different types off trees. Not entirely sure about the number. It got messy midway through xD.

edit: for anyone whos interested: i use the procedual foliage spawner to place the forests and even most of the stuff on the ground except for the grass and small rocks. It really is an awesome tool.

Hi again,

i’ve captured a little video and uploaded it to youtube. Its really short cause i got no time left. I will add more shots in the future as it all progresses (hopefully this will end in some kind of trailer). I made the music on it myself in case some of you are wondering. The ingamefootage wasn’t edited in any way. I’m only using the engine’s postproccessing.
It also shows some of the particle systems i build and some generel movement of the foliage.

I hope you like it.

Hi again,

i got something else now. This is some form of heavy armortype characterdesign with linke enchanted setpieces of some sort. Havent been able to get it into the engine yet but wanted to show off the turntable for it. I hope you like the design.

[webm]https://zippy.gfycat.com/AcrobaticZestyFlatfish.webm[/webm]

is the webm bb broken?

here a youtube mirror, though i would have preferred a loop:

character has 30 k polys with a complete human modell underneath

Your landscape is looking really neat! The foliage blends very well with the terrain.
Congrats on the pic of the day ^^

Looks great!

What frame rate do you get walking through that landscape, on what hardware?

He mentions is earlier in the thread

>i get around 40-50 frames per sec on the newer landscape with scaling on epic on a gtx970. And there is still a lot that isnt optimized so i guess im on the right track.

Oof! With and enemies and characters, that might drop a bit further.
Sure looks nice though! And if you start a game today, a GeForce 1080 will be middle of the road by the time you ship :slight_smile:

Amazing work @gou!

@ quintela : thank you. What do you mean by pic of the day?

 @vanlacke/jwatte: Yes exactly that. Im not aiming to make a lowend-pcfriendly thing, but more of a highendexperience. On this topic i really need to emphasize that im really bad with the technical stuff. That means im sure there is so much stuff that i can optimize without compromizing the quality(i.e. my lods mostly suck hard). Fun fact: I loose most of the fps with the landscape itself not the foliage. My landscapeshader isnt even that complex but as soon as use more than 2 paintlayers it gets to a bright red in the shadercomplexity...

Anyway i really would love to make a full game with this. But to be honest this isnt something one man can do. Not with the goals i have in mind (ontop i still have a to maintain my vfx job). I’ve always loved games like the elder scroll series and the new witcher 3 game also taught me that you can do good storytelling too. So if you would be able to combine epic firstperson immersion with the storytelling of i.e witcher 3, that would be a dream come true for me :D. With the new unreal engine im at least capable of showing what i imagined visually.

my full pc specs at the moment are: Intel i7-2600 - gtx970 - 16 gb ram - asus p8p67EVO

 @n00854180t : Thank you. Im really glad that you guys like my work so far. I will also try to make some breakdowns in the future where i show how i made the landscapetextures and the foliage.

Sadly now updates for now. BACK TO WORK!!! :cool:

@gou I mean a picture of this project is highlighted in the epic launcher as “pic of the day” :slight_smile:

Ok thats awesome. Im really happy now :smiley:

I never post in the forums but I saw this as the “pic of the day” and I just came here to say “wow”.

Your landscaping work is excellent, and the scenes are very beautiful, well done!