Hi all! I just wanted to share you my WIP UE4 environment. It my first time using the engine so I´m kind of n00b still :). So the goal here is to make abandoned gas station scene where I can learn how to use Unreal Engine and hopefully get some good looking results. I also want to do everything by myself to really learn more about everything.
So far I have used 5 months of my free time with it (weekends only). I have very solid idea about the scene where I want to go with it. Under you can see the block out.
So basically there would be three interior places (diner, small shop and garage) and a semi large exterior area with a lot of overgrown vegetation. So far diner interior is somehow done and I started to make the exterior parts.
My weapons for this one are 3ds max for modeling, ZBrush for detailing, Xnormal for baking, Substance Designer/Painter and Photoshop for texturing, Marmoset Toolbag2 for fast previewing.
Here are some shots about the hi-poly vegetation. I modeled them all in max and baked camera space normal. For base colors I just heavily used basic gradients and noises that max have and baked them as well. So far I got the small foliage done. Trees and other bigger assets are still at the WIP stage.
As for the materials, I have few master materials like the one that I use with props, another that is blending the ground stuff (see under), foliage material, material for transparent stuff like glass.
I made a pretty big set of different props that I´m using to set dress the whole scene. Here is a small shot of that as well. They are very optimized so I can use a lot of them and I also used a lot of texture atlases so I could combine those models into different sets that I can place in my scene + can save draw calls.
Has a good flavor to it, the layout looks like the gas station from black ops 2 zombies… (then again im not sure how many ways you can do a gas station / diner)
I like scenes a lot. It is very AAA worthy! I have to wonder though, what do you plan to do as a full project? I can see you being able to push a good looking title in a years time.
I’m a noob by most standards but you and your skills certainly could get you somewhere. Unreal Engine isn’t hard… it’s just a lot to remember. You’ll pick it up quick with your skill set.
Sorry for my lack of updates. Been really busy @ work and used all my free time making more foliage stuff into this project. Reading more UE4 documentation and testing different lighting setups. I also made pretty fast World Machine landscape there too. I´m planning to make very detail post mortem breakdown when I got everything done. Useful for me to sit down and write stuff about my mistakes and different solutions that I came up during the project. Maybe even but the whole scene out at some form. There´s a lot of textures and generic foliage stuff to share.
Nice work so far! I’m curious how you are doing the cracked pavement. I’m guessing it’s layered materials with vertex paint but maybe you could talk a little about your setup. I’m working on a scene that has cracked pavement and I’m still thinking of different ways to do it. Also, did you make the textures? I’m thanks, keep up the good work!
Thanks! I tested few setup actually. First I modeled different broken ground pieces and then modeled a looping asphalt texture in ZBrush. It looked bad so I ended up using some time to build the textures in Substance Designer and using just a simple ground model with a simple topology that is dense enough for good vertex painting. Good thing about Substance Designer is that since it´s fully procedural it was very easy to get different asphalt textures out of it so I used two different looping asphalt textures.
Then on top of that I made a simple moss material that is controlled by vertex color but it also use the asphalt height information for better blending. Then there´s also water layer that is also controlled by vertex color. It´s very complex material but it covers so much area so it´s worth it Asphalt materials is using parallax mapping because my system is too old to support dx11. I´m planning to put this into the market place when it´s done so people can see what I did.
Sorry for my lack of updates. Been really busy making it better. I tweaked almost every aspect of it. I also started to make the final camera animation for it. Here is a fast sneak peak. http://i.imgur.com/hJazfv1.jpg
Thanks so much for the reply! Really good information and I think it looks great! Parallax mapping is really awesome, I was testing it out with some forest textures and man it makes things really pop!
It´s finally done! Here is more better looking shots: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xmkwW Making of can be found here: http://kimmokaunela.esy.es/lfi05.html Thanks all of you for important feedback and I hope you have had as much fun following this project as I had making it. I will capture a video at some point and then put the whole project to Gumroad for free so people can download it and send me some hate mail
Asphalt materials is using parallax mapping because my system is too old to support dx11. I´m planning to put this into the market place when it´s done so people can see what I did.
very nice also that unreal now highlights good stuff from the forum in the launcher, you deserve the highlight.
