Trying to improve terrains and lighting

Trying to get better lighting on the terrain… So many relights… I wish it was faster…

just from a pure artistic perspective, I’d say add foliage to break up the areas that you don’t like so that they catch more or less light depending on what you soo. I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wrong with these images, other than the obviously tiled textures when looked at from up high.

buy adding clutter to break out these areas may help make it more realistic looking.

as for lighting, I don’t think there is anything there that looks wrong, rather it’s probably just more of the same issue, if you had more stuff off into the horizon it would break up that line more and make things feel more natural.

Epic really need to come through on the whole Real-Time GI thing, it’s ridiculous to have a AAA next gen engine without it…

I’m not sure that would really help in this case, At this scale the GI detail would be easy to miss.

What that sort of thing is really good at are interiors, or any kind of emissive interactions, and I do miss that kind of thing.

I understand their reasons for taking it out, but yeah, I don’t play on consoles so I’m not terribly concerned that they could not handle the Voxel GI. But then I am not the guy having to call those shots for maximizing the engine’s profitability and code management. :wink:

i think it looks fine. in real life mountains cast some pretty big shadows… the only way to change that to look more natural is to change position of the sun… (the edges of the shadows need softening on the ground is about the only thing i see)

UV tiling for the grass should also be increased, as it is quite apparent on the bottom left hand corner of the last image. You’ll also get better lighting with less height, as McTurbo pointed out, those are some pretty big shadows.

Thanks all I’ve adjusted the settings but now I’m trying o get vegetation that actually looks good with this lighting its so **** frustrating lol.

That looks pretty nice looking. Have you tried using option to re-enable the Light Propagation Volumes GI? I did that as a test for the game my company is working on and it is awesome and no performance hit really. A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements and Releases - Unreal Engine Forums also do you have any links for Landmass Creating similar to yours, mainly the texturing aspect cause it’s a tad different from UE3/UDK lol.

Looks good. I would add change your material setup though. E.g. dont use a single texture for your grass. What I woudld do is take grass texture and blend it with another grass texture which is upscaled by the factor 4. This way you can break the very obvious tiling you see in the last picture. In most cases you need to adjust brightness and desaturation.

Yeah I agree with order66 I used to be a noob with using 1 grass texture but when I started learning the art of blending the results were outstanding!