Hello!
This is an environment I originally started to learn Unreal Engine. I graduated from school a few months ago, however we didn´t really do any realtime there. So, sience I really want to go into games, I was really exited to make this project real.
Most of the stuff you see has gone through a lot of iteration over time. Realising that I wouldn´t be able to have a unique high res texture set on everything, I tried to create triplanar projected blend materials for all of the cave objects like rocks and flowstone so I would be able to use the same material on them and just blend between them via Vertex Paint. However, that turned out to be even worse sience I still was using 4k texture sets (Base Color, Normal and Roughness/Occlusion). Also, you have to do some math to get triplanar projected normal maps to be working correctly which is quite performance heavy. So, this way, it really forced me to learn how to get texture blending right. In the end, I decided to have multiple tiling detail textures that are blended inside the shaders which gave me more control over the appearance and also more detail without using high res textures. It´s really amazing how much you can tile textures without it being visible if you blend them with other textures.
You can see a bit of tiling on the right hand side of that image, but you really don´t notice it when viewing it from a “normal” distance and it´s a super cheap way to create nice details
I created all of the textures in Substance Painter and Designer (which also includes the rock displacement maps sience I don´t own a zBrush licenece). I think you can see some improvement over time; the locomotive and the tent are the first assets I created and at that point I didn´t really have a clue how high res you can go with your geometry and your textures, so I maybe was a bit too careful with those.
Anyway, I am still amazed by what you can do with the shaders in Unreal; I had a lot of fun experimenting with SSS on the flowstone material. Also, I found out you can create some really nice dust effects using Fresnel on your masks.
For the lighting, I primarily used baked stationary lights.
Another thing I found exiting to figure out was the water. My first approach was to have a single plane with a depth fade. The poblem with that was that as soon as I added refraction to it, I basicly had a double image. Sience the refraction is just a post effect in UE4, you get the objects underwater offset, but your depth fade mask, which in my case controlled color and opacity of the water, is still where it was. So instead, I decided to use a volume material that is rendered on a particle - this is just following the method that was suggested in the UE4 feature highlight for volumetric fog; I just used a big box mask to control the height and position of the fog.
Obviously, there are still a lot of things that I´m not happy with, but I need to move on now.
So, please let me know what you think! Any feedback will help me to improve on my work so I really appreciate all of it!