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