Fantasy adventure environment

Hey folks!

As part of my minor I’m building an environment alongside of some workflow practises. I’ve skipped (missed) two generations of Unreal Engine, and it was about time I dropped myself into that uncharted ravine. I had little real-world reference material apart from adventure games like Zelda and the upcoming Rime.

When I saw this screenshot of Dragon Quest XII didn’t know which game it was, or what the gameplay was like. I could tell what kind of game it would be, just by seeing the environment. My personal goal is to achieve the same effect.

I’m going to stick my guns to 3DSMax, SpeedTree and Substance Designer for all my assets.

Latest progress:

http://i.imgur.com/PardGlU.jpg

Development:
[spoiler]

Rocks:
[spoiler]I had been doing some production tests on procedural rocks using Vue and Substance Designer. Where I’d take blob-like shape, tessellate them and use a rock displacement material to shape them into… rocks. This didn’t turn out too nice, mostly because Substance Designer’s tri-planar projection needs 16-bit position maps to work with. That’s something UE4 can’t work with, so quick compression is done, taking a large chunk out of the normal map’s quality.

Rock Substance
Available for download here: https://share.allegorithmic.com/libraries/1026

http://i.imgur.com/G3rVL8P.gif

Displaced Vue mesh with tri-planar adjusted maps

http://i.imgur.com/SNLXdGi.gif

Broken normals in engine

http://i.imgur.com/mqXvH7S.gif

http://i.imgur.com/eDgGRTS.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/XmOU3iY.jpg

At this point I opted to just sculpt the primary shapes and gives the Substance control over the smaller details.

http://i.imgur.com/JEyWYrD.jpg

The rocks are textured by using the Substance Batch tools, for which I wrote a front-end windows app. This way I could keep working on the Substance without having to apply its changes to every single rock mesh. I’m utilizing tri=planar projection, so no fussing about UVs.

Here you can see a new mesh’s maps being baked (Normal, AO, curvature etc) and being used by the Substance to create a material.

http://i.imgur.com/3G8blLb.gif

[/spoiler]

Trees:
[spoiler]
I’m using the vertex trick as shown here:
http://simonschreibt.de/gat/airborn-trees/

http://i.imgur.com/KzxhacW.png

Using a material created in Substance Designer so I have control over their color in the engine

http://i.imgur.com/p2mb51D.png

For performance consideration I opted to use the sphere and leaf mesh separately in SpeedTree. Hoping it would cull the leaf meshes on the back, essentially cutting the polycount in half.

http://i.imgur.com/wqA809t.png

Unfortunately, because the sphere and the leafs ended up as seperate objects the normals were not uniform anymore. Causing dark spots from certain angles.

http://i.imgur.com/aTQukOH.jpg

Instead I used the original “single mesh” method which solved the problem. Should I feel inclined I make LODs for this mesh to use in SpeedTree.

http://i.imgur.com/e3AiVjc.jpg

[/spoiler]

Environment
[spoiler]
Late blockout

http://i.imgur.com/MQVEOCj.jpg

First post-processing pass

http://i.imgur.com/r1fdzVg.jpg

Backdrop using World Machine, Substance Designer (for adjustable snow/grass) and Filter Forge for the clouds

http://i.imgur.com/Au414eK.jpg

Foliage shading improvements

http://i.imgur.com/MDb8vyT.jpg

Rock substance in terrain material. Using Heightlerp the rocks poke out and transition nicely with the grass.

http://i.imgur.com/TkuZcje.gif

Map overview (Unfinished cave in the bottom right)

http://i.imgur.com/QWolYSF.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/d8lyXie.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/03KyKtb.jpg

[/spoiler]
More details on my Trello board: Trello

It has a clean look to it, nice work. Keep it up. =)

Those trees look fantastic. Infact the entire scene and development look great!

Cant wait to see further improvements, keep up the good work!

Just checked out your Trello. As someone just wetting their feet in UE4 and Maya, this is very helpful and inspiring. Please keep it up, for my sake :cool:

One critique, however: the trees in the Dragon Quest screencap you posted have much more cohesive groupings of leaves, which are more nebulous and less like the cubist orbs you are working with. I think it’s this sense of mass, combined with underlighting on the branches, which really gives them a sense of tree-ness. Any ideas on how to get a similar mesh?

Also, another question – I see the normals are re-oriented here so as to not create odd dark spots, but what are they mapped to? Are they sprites, always facing the player?

Ah yes, I really like how those trees are full, and resemble birch trees. It’s hard to tell from the blurry screenshots available, but I think those bushes might be layered like lettuce. Meaning a sphere covered in layers of half-bowl-like planes, I’m curious about trying this out for a huge tree I have in the scene.

As for the normals, I use Mesh->Transfer Attributes in maya to transfer (only) the vertex normals of the base sphere into the leaf meshes. I then use this mesh as a frond in SpeedTree.

This looks really nice. Good job!
How big of a performance impact does tessellation of your landscape have? I tried a similar approach a bit before but decided against it because of performance issues. I never did it this advanced though since I gave up when I figured it would be too costly. Any pointers on keeping the performance cost down?

Cheers!

The tessellation itself has no performance impact whatsoever. I was curious about this too before I started and found that other people didn’t have any issues with it. Even without tessellation the rock displacement looks good enough.

One thing that gives me a small frame rate boost is setting the “LODDistance Factor” on my landscape. This controls the distance at which the terrain loses detail, mountains in the distance will start to look chunky. The default value is 1, I currently have it set to 5.

Thanks, you inspired me to try it again and it worked way better than when I last tried a long time ago.

I’ve been trying out what works and what doesn’t in terms of lighting. Certain foliage items look bad when using static lighting, the grass in particular. The leafs on the trees will self-shadow with a static shadow, which looked terrible. So lots of dynamic shadows at this point, which is murdering my frame rate.

Next to that I’ve revised the tree bushes and their material. And I’ve been playing around a lot with lighting and post processing. There are literally a millions ways I can go with it, still don’t think I’m quite there yet!

Added wind to the foliage (which you can’t see :P). Going to focus my efforts on building some non-natural structures, because there’s way too much green!

I experimented a bit with different kind of leafs, but it was not a resounding success.

Experimented a bit with an easy way to make stone walls. Using world-space tiling on the material I can kit-bash pieces together to make a single large piece. A gravel-like material is placed on top using VertexNormalWS. It’s also because WorldAlignedTexture doesn’t work for 3-axis, so I would have ugly stretched out textures otherwise. I wanted to make the grass material appear on the object where it touches the terrain, couldn’t get it working though.

Heavy gif: http://i.imgur.com/prWmEyL.gifv

wow the aesthetic is really nice, you’ve done a really good job!

I’ve been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, the assignment is due on Thursday so I’m going to spend the time on making a matinee flythrough of the scene. I have a few second of it to show here (it wont be much longer in the end though) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIx4sv-FlSA&feature=youtu.be

In retrospect on this project I’m pretty satisfied overall. I’m really happy I finally got to learn UE4, as I won’t be afraid to use it for my next project (whatever that might be). As for the artistic side, I definitely want to brush up (pun intended) on my rock sculpting skills, I feel like a large part of the esthetics suffered because of my lack of practise.

Next week, when I have more time, I’ll post some breakdowns of my materials. If I can figure out how I will put them up for download here :slight_smile:

The style looks fantastic in my opinion. The rocks really fit well with it thats for sure. I think your walls are probably the only thing that needs a little more improving.

This all looks really good! One small gripe I would say is that since the environment is so high contrast and colorful, I kind of lose the character in all of it.

Maybe adding a stroke around the character via post processing?

Something like this: http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/2179/181809-pop4__4_.jpg