Hello Everyone,
Over the Next couple Months I’m going to be creating an environment in unreal engine again,
This time around the theme is going to be east Asian.
This is the gist of the idea so far, The Blocking i have right now is very simple but I’m going to improve it over the coming week.
All the very best Nima.
Hi there @Nyx.Nim,
Hope you’re well and having a wonderful week so far 
Really impressed by the reference pictures you’ve chosen. I can’t wait to see the lanterns. They’re always a favorite of mine. Good luck and happy developing until next time 
Hey Everyone,
First Week’s update so far :
I Went through a couple approaches about how to make the the buildings but decided on the 2 sided modular floor approach.
each of the modular blocks have 2 sides each with a different variation giving me a bit of diversity in the scene, but it isn’t too much.
I made 2 floors for the hexagonal building and 2 floors with an additional moon door for the rectangular Buildings.
I made a blueprint for each building type and placed them through that and just changed them on the instance for variation.
they still need some extra modelling and tweaks but its coming along well.
i progressed the modelling on the lanterns and stone fences too but now I’m thinking i might wanna do their texturing in substance painter and bake them. because I want to really bring out the chinese aesthetic with them.
Hey Everyone,
Back with another update, this week I went through different compositions and different iterations of the surrounding environment, trying out different ideas, currently the problem is all the ideas look very cool and cinematic from far away and at a distance, but in the level itself there isn’t any intriguing thing going on.
I’m going to try to make the level a bit more appealing by thinking about small assets I could add to give a bit more life to the scene, before getting to the heavy lifting stuff with vertex painting and decals and foliage.
Also I Made a Waterfall Effect with The Niagara Particle System.
went a bit crazy at first and crashed my GPU twice (smh).
Also I modeled a new set of assets too to add a bit more variation but its not that diffirent.
Hello Everyone, back with another weekly update.
This week I made a lot of progress, I adjusted the Texel density of the UVs for all assets because they share the same material instances and the tiling was incorrect.
I made a cobblestone material in Quixel Mixer with variations to use as the flooring for each of the flat surfaces alongside Vertex Painting.
I Also added Foliage to cover up 70% of the empty spaces.
had a bit of difficulty with finding suitable tree assets, because most are very heavy exceeding 100k vertices in most cases (some reaching 2mil), in the end I kinda had to kit-bash it myself using a couple different assets with my own materials.
I Also decided not to do bridges, i reduced the elevation of some surfaces and instead made stone steps using 2 stone assets, it turned out better than I had originally expected.
I spent a decent amount of time on thinking about effects.
There are Fireflies in the environment created by using a Niagara Particle Simulation, I didn’t go suuuper crazy with the spawn rate but I do think anything more and It’ll become too fake.
I created a Flickering effect on the emissive material for the Chinese Lanterns since they’re lit using a ton of fireflies inside them, I used a bit of math to avoid the flickering from entirely going out and not becoming suuper bright.
I Applied the same Logic to a Light Function to control the Brightness of the Light Cast on the Surrounding areas of the Lanterns
I Made a Fire Simulation aswell to use inside the Stone Lanterns, it seemed like a waste not to use them in the night setting of the scene.
It’s not too complicated I added an emitter for the fire itself with a range of Colors based on the life-cycle of the particle, Another Emitter for the smoke, 1 Emitter for the fire embers and one last Emitter for the Heat Distortion
Here is a Preview of the Simulations together, Flickering Emissive, Light, Fireflies and Fire.
Also Just a General Preview of the Level So Far.
I Still need to Optimize everything so that it runs at 60fps but honestly I have no idea how to achieve that yet, from what I understand the problem is Landscape and/or Landscape Material and the Tree assets i used based on the shader complexity Viewport
